After cutting costs by $7.5 billion in 2023, Disney is continuing on its mission to drop its expenditure in 2024 and they’re reducing costs by billions.

The Walt Disney Company has had a tough 2023; there’s no doubt about it. The entire year has been spent cleaning up the mess that former Disney CEO Bob Chapek left in his wake after he was ousted from his position in November 2022. His predecessor and now successor, Bob Iger, is back at the helm and has made many decisions that have been entirely unpopular with fans (and sometimes, employees, alike).

Disney Embarks on Cost-Cutting Spree

One of the main things that has characterized Disney’s 2023 is the amount of time and effort they’ve put into cutting costs down by $5.5 billion. At the beginning of the year, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that the company was going to be undertaking massive layoffs to the tune of 7000 people’s jobs being affected in order to help this cause.

For many months, employees were incredibly tense, and the environment at the Walt Disney Company was said to be characterized by a “sense of foreboding,” however, three rounds of layoffs later, it appears the dust has settled.

As part of the 4000 people who lost their jobs, Bob Iger also let go of some of the senior executives within Disney, including some C-suite execs like Christine McCarthy and chief diversity officer Latondra Newton.

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Disney’s November 8 Earnings Call

On November 8, Disney had their fourth-quarter earnings call in which they revealed a few interesting insights about where the company stands right now.

For one, after these significant layoffs, Bob Iger claimed that the company was finally entering a “new era” of building and growth. He acknowledged that they had faced a tough year and looked forward to what was to come. They also share the positive news that Disney has managed to cut costs by $7.5 billion—a whopping $2 billion more than they initially intended.

That wasn’t all, however. Disney also announced that they would be cutting costs once again in 2024.

Read More: After Firing 4,000 Employees and Canceling 3,000 Jobs, Bob Iger Declares “New Era” for Disney

Interim CFO Kevin Lansberry—who was recently replaced by former PepsiCo CFO Hugh Johnston—said that next year, the company expects to spend only $25 billion on content—a number that is down from $27 billion from fiscal 2023.

This is primarily due to the WGA (Writers Guild of America) and the SAG-AFTRA strikes, as well as Iger’s new content strategy.

Iger mentioned during the earnings call that they will be focusing more on big films rather than series—which is a change in their streaming service content—and “gives us the ability to dial back a bit on some of the spending and investment in series. And that blend of spending between films and series, we believe gives us an opportunity to increase our margins and grow the business.”

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Kevin Lansberry also commented that the company is now targeting an “annualized entertainment cash content spend reduction target” of $4.5 billion, excluding the impact of the strikes. He added that it will “take a few years for the bulk of the savings to be reflected in the P&L due to the timing of amortization.”

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