Disney announces 4,000 additional layoffs of theme park employees

Executives at Walt Disney Co. marked the holidays by announcing another round of employee layoffs – 4,000 more – to happen by the first half of fiscal year 2021.

In October, Disney announced 28,000 employee layoffs, mostly in the theme-parks division, in an SEC filing. Disney employees in Central Florida ended up taking the brunt of those cuts: 18,000 of those fired were employees at Walt Disney World Resort.

These numbers are cutting deep locally, with the Orlando Sentinel estimating the 18,000 employees to be almost a quarter of the total workforce in Walt Disney World. And that was, obviously, before last week's revised estimate of 32,000 layoffs.

As of this writing it has not been confirmed how many of the 4,000 workers impacted will be from Central Florida – indeed, a spokesman dodged that direct question – but it's bad news no matter what.

Worth noting is that despite falling revenues from theme parks (we're in the middle of a pandemic, after all), Disney overall still exceeded revenue expectations in a 4th-quarter earnings report in mid-November, reporting $14.71 billion vs. an expected $14.20 billion, per CNBC. And yet the layoffs continue.

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