Netflix has announced its largest round of layoffs in years, informing approximately 1,000 employees — around 6% of its global workforce — that their positions are being eliminated. Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters delivered the news in a memo to staff on Wednesday, with product, technology, legal, and human resources teams facing the deepest cuts.
“Our mission — to entertain the world — is ambitious, and delivering on it requires us to be disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources,” Sarandos and Peters wrote. “Our business is strong and growing, and we remain on track to deliver our full year forecast. We’ll continue to invest aggressively in high impact areas to improve our service and further drive growth and innovation. Doing that means making focused choices across the business.”
The company declined to comment beyond the memo. Quarterly earnings are due on October 20th.
Why Now
The announcement follows Sarandos’s admission at the Bloomberg Screentime conference earlier this month that Netflix was “not growing as fast as I want.” The streaming leader remains profitable — in the second quarter, it earned $3.4 billion on revenue of $12.56 billion, up 9% and 13% year on year respectively — but its third-quarter forecast came in below Wall Street’s expectations, and viewing time has plateaued despite continued subscriber additions driven primarily by its password-sharing crackdown and the growth of its cheaper ad-supported tier.
Netflix accounts for approximately 19% of the global streaming market, according to JustWatch, but competition is intensifying on multiple fronts. YouTube remains its most significant challenger for overall watch time. More immediately, the newly formed Skydance — the combined entity of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, whose merger closed last week — is planning to eventually unify HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single service, creating a more formidable streaming rival. Netflix had initially been in talks to acquire Warner’s studio and streaming assets late last year before walking away from that deal in February.
The company has spent recent years diversifying into live sports, video games, and documentaries, but has lacked the breakout cultural moments that Stranger Things and Squid Game once provided to drive subscriber growth.
Who Is Out — and What It Means for Netflix Film
Among those let go is Doug Belgrad, a senior figure in Netflix’s film division who had served as a key deputy to film chairman Dan Lin since joining the company from Sony in 2024. Belgrad had overseen the original live-action film slate’s production executives and had worked closely with major talent including Guillermo del Toro on Frankenstein, Pete Berg on Mosquito Bowl, and Greta Gerwig on Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, among many others. He had attended the Los Angeles world premiere of Ben Affleck’s Animals just days before the layoffs were announced.
Netflix’s film division, structured by genre under Lin, remains otherwise intact. Kira Goldberg oversees thrillers, Jason Young handles action, and Hannah Minghella leads animation. Belgrad remains chairman of his own production company, 2.0 Entertainment, which continues to develop and co-finance independent features.
Netflix is not alone in cutting staff in the current media environment. Disney announced approximately 300 layoffs last month, also concentrated in technology and human resources.
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