Netflix Replaces Content Chief Bela Bajaria with Peter Rice Amid Leadership Shakeup

Netflix has parted ways with Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria, appointing former Disney and Fox executive Peter Rice as her successor.

The move follows days of speculation regarding Bajaria’s departure and coincides with the streaming giant’s layoff of approximately 1,000 employees—roughly 6% of its workforce—earlier this week.

Bajaria joined Netflix a decade ago as a vice president, shortly after exiting NBCUniversal, where she served as president of Universal Television. She rose to oversee all TV operations four years later and was elevated to chief content officer in 2023.

Netflix has historically avoided broad layoffs—the recent cuts were the first in four years—preferring instead to empower individual teams to make personnel changes as needed. Co-founder Reed Hastings famously likened the company to a championship sports team rather than a family, arguing that roster changes are necessary to win. “If you say it’s like a championship sports team… then people understand why the coaches make changes,” Hastings told a Semafor podcast in August.

Rice brings deep industry experience. A 20th Century Fox veteran, he joined The Walt Disney Co. via the studio’s acquisition and eventually oversaw all of Disney’s entertainment operations before being ousted by then-CEO Bob Chapek in 2022. Most recently, Rice led content strategy for the LA28 Olympic Games.

In a statement, co-CEO Ted Sarandos credited Bajaria with presiding over Netflix’s expansion into unscripted programming, live events, and sports. Of Rice, Sarandos said the executive would help the company “continue to scale and deliver members more of the stories they love.”

“Netflix has fundamentally changed the way stories are made, shared and experienced around the world,” Rice said in a statement.

The leadership overhaul extends beyond Bajaria. Netflix also exited several other executives in recent days, including film VP Doug Belgrad and television executives Lisa Lang McMullen, James Oh, Carolina Garcia, and Andrew McQuinn.

The layoffs arrive as Netflix seeks a reset amid slowing viewership growth. While the company remains highly profitable and its business continues to expand rapidly, engagement has been less consistent. At the Bloomberg Screentime summit on September 30, Sarandos acknowledged, “overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster.”

Over the past few years, Netflix has aggressively pursued live sports, events, video podcasts, and creator content to diversify viewership and sustain engagement, even as it maintains heavy investment in scripted and unscripted film and television.

“Bela has built and shaped a truly global Content organization, hiring brilliant people and empowering them to make good decisions. I am incredibly grateful to her for everything she’s done,” Sarandos wrote in a memo to staff. “I know this is a big change in a year that has already had its share. But I also see an opportunity to take our slate to the next level, especially in UCAN where we have an outsize impact in creating big, buzzy hits that our members love and drive conversation around the world.”

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