LOS GATOS
Netflix spent a decade teaching the rest of television how to grow. On Wednesday, it delivered a different kind of lesson: even the winner of the streaming wars has started deciding it employs more people than its next chapter needs.
Reuters reported that Netflix is laying off about 6% of its workforce — roughly 1,000 employees — in its biggest round of job cuts since 2022, according to an internal memo the news agency saw. The bulk of the cuts fall on the company's product, technology, legal and human-resources teams, according to the email co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos sent to employees on Wednesday. In that memo, as Reuters reported it, the co-CEOs said the company's mission requires discipline about where it prioritizes people and resources, while stressing that the business is strong and growing and remains on track to deliver its full-year forecast.
Both things can be true at once, and at Netflix right now they plainly are. This is not a company in a cash crisis. TechDefused reported that Netflix posted $45.2 billion in revenue and $11 billion in net income for 2025, and projects 2026 revenue of $51.0 billion to $51.4 billion. It remains, by a wide margin, the largest premium streaming service in the world. And yet the cuts are real, they are the deepest since the company shed about 450 jobs in 2022 after its first subscriber decline in more than a decade, and they reach well beyond the back office.
Variety reported that film vice president Doug Belgrad and Sheroum Kim, a director in the film division focused on independent films, were among those let go. Belgrad's exit is the one that will make Hollywood sit up: he ran Columbia Pictures as its president during a long Sony career before joining Netflix in 2024 as a top deputy to film chairman Dan Lin — in fact, US Brief's summary of the reporting notes Belgrad was Lin's first major hire. Kim had been at Netflix since 2019. When a restructuring takes out the film chief's right hand and the indie-film lead in the same week, it is not just trimming. It is a statement about how the movie division is going to be run.
The television side took hits too. Deadline reported, via mxdwn's account of the layoffs, that four director-level TV executives — Lisa Lang McMullen, James Oh, Carolina Garcia and Andrew McQuinn — were among the departures, along with managers Dan Evans, Jason Pan and Aaron Davidson across original series and animation. Garcia had been at Netflix since 2016 and worked on series including Stranger Things; McQuinn, who joined in 2018, contributed to productions including American Primeval and Griselda. These are not anonymous headcount. They are people who built the catalog the rest of the industry has spent years chasing.
So why now? Reuters pointed to the pressure building around Netflix rather than inside it: tougher competition for viewing time from legacy rivals and from YouTube, investor concern about engagement — the hours people actually spend watching — and a stock down about 25% so far this year, even as it ticked up slightly on Wednesday. eMarketer senior analyst Ross Benes told Reuters the company still has not found another major line of revenue beyond subscriptions, a business he suggested could be approaching a ceiling. Add a failed pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery's streaming and studio assets earlier this year — Paramount completed its Warner Bros. acquisition this month, Reuters noted — and the strategic picture is a leader whose moat is real but no longer widening on its own.
Sarandos himself has said the quiet part out loud recently. Film Stories, summarizing the coverage, noted he acknowledged last month that Netflix was not growing as fast as he wanted and that the company was working on moving faster. Read against Wednesday's memo, the layoffs look like the operational version of that sentence: fewer layers, fewer people, more urgency — announced, pointedly, five days before third-quarter earnings on October 20, when Netflix will have to show investors what the leaner machine is for.
For the roughly 1,000 people who got the news Wednesday, of course, none of that framing softens anything, and it would be glib to pretend the strategy talk matters more than the jobs. What can be said honestly is this: Netflix has done this before, in 2022, and came out of it stronger and more profitable than ever. Whether this round reads, a year from now, as discipline or as the first visible sign of a ceiling will depend on what the company builds with the focus it says it is buying. The catalog those departing executives leave behind is the standard. The next one gets judged against it.
What happens next is a familiar Silicon Valley sequence: affected teams reorganize around the priorities the co-CEOs named, hiring continues in the high-impact areas Netflix says it will fund aggressively, and the rest of the industry watches the October 20 earnings call for the first hard numbers on engagement, advertising growth, and whether this leaner structure is a one-time reset or the start of a longer tightening across streaming.
