Disney is pulling out of the Metaverse; according to the Wall Street Journal (opens in new tab), the House of Mouse has completely eliminated its "Next Generation Storytelling & Customer Experience Unit" responsible for Metaverse strategy.

The head of the unit, Mike White, will remain at Disney, but the 50 or so staff under him were not so lucky. They all had to find new jobs. This is quite a cutback, but it is only the first wave of Disney CEO Bob Iger's long-term restructuring plan.

Under Iger, Disney plans to cut $5.5 billion in costs (open in new tab). The next wave will come in April, and when all is said and done, thousands of employees will lose their jobs.

Iger is apparently not as enamored with the Metaverse as his predecessor, Bob Chapek, who hired White in 2022 and told investors at the November 2021 earnings call that Disney's "efforts to date have been to bring the physical and digital worlds more closely . is just the prelude to a time when we will be able to connect the physical and digital worlds even more closely," and that at that point the company will achieve "storytelling without boundaries in Disney's unique metaverse."

Iger does not seem to share his enthusiasm, even though he invested in the Metaverse startup (open in new tab) before returning to the Disney CEO chair. At the time, Iger spoke of the Metaverse as enabling "new forms of creativity, expression, and communication" and the "democratization" of the Internet under Web 3.0, which would "definitely be more compelling in experience and certainly more immersive and more dimensional" He said. [because the Disney metaverse is an afterthought, if still on the stove. Mike White will remain at Disney, but no one knows yet what his role will be in the future.

The Metaverse has been strangely and mercifully quiet lately, with several companies seemingly backing away a bit from the so-called future of the Internet. But since Microsoft closed its "social virtual reality platform" AltspaceVR (opens in new tab) earlier this year, and even metaverse evangelist-in-chief Mark Zuckerberg has been talking a bit more about AI lately (opens in new tab), the future seems to be on hold temporarily.