This week Disney furloughed as many as 100,000 workers due to COVID-19. Many of these furloughs are from the parks, however some are from the movie studio and TV division. They plan on paying 100% of health insurance costs for their workers that are currently covered for as long as 12 months.
Several other large media companies face similar goals and challenges as Disney, such as Comcast and AT&T. AT&T’s market cap is $222 billion, Comcast’s is $169 billion and Disney’s is $185 billion. The situations they share are that they all have movie studios that are suffering from the closure of theaters because of COVID-19 and they are all working towards the cord-cutting trend.
However, parks and resorts are Disney’s largest division, bringing in 35% of their revenue last year. AT&T has no affiliations with a park and Comcast only derives 5.4% of their revenue from parks. These companies are not forced to furlough the drastic amount of employees as Disney does because of the parks closures.
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