Disney dumps recent releases from streaming platform

Disney is dropping a bunch of its newer TV shows and movies in a global move – and it will affect Australian customers.

The practice of removing new and recent TV shows and movies from streaming platforms has finally reached Australia.

Disney will from May 26 cull a selection of its original titles from Disney+ in Australia, in line with a global move.

There is no confirmed local list of titles that will be dumped but in the US, the shows and movies slated to disappear from its Disney+ and Hulu platforms include The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers sequel series, John Stamos show Big Shot, the Willow sequel series, Artemis Fowl movie adaptation,The Mysterious Benedict Society starring Tony Hale, The One and Only Ivan starring Bryan Cranston, Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols miniseries Pistol, Rosaline and The World According to Jeff Goldblum.

Many titles on US service Hulu, which is majority owned by Disney, are available on Disney+ in Australia.

Rosaline will be shelved seven months after its release. Picture: 20th Century Fox

While it’s not unusual for older titles to disappear from streaming services as licencing deals expire, cutting recent releases and originals is a relatively new trend. Many of the shows and movies being taken off in this round were released in the past year.

The Romeo and Juliet adjacent rom-com Rosaline came out in October while The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers dropped its most recent episode in November.

Studios are choosing to dump their own work because in some cases, they can save more money to can it than to keep it on the platform.

The measurement of a show’s success on streaming is a complex and opaque formula and relies not solely on how many people watched it and for how long, but whether it was responsible for attracting new subscribers or staving off membership cancellations.

Disney’s move allows them to take a writedown on the value of those shelved titles, as part of the company’s wider promise to Wall Street investors to find billions in cost-savings. What this means is that the works – and the audience’s ability to access them – have been sacrificed at the altar of profit.

Disney’s chief financial officer Christine McCarthy earlier flagged the removals were coming, and said it expected to take an impairment charge of between $US1.5 billion and $US1.8 billion.

Willow is set to be culled from Disney+ in the US from May 26.

Disney is not the first entertainment business to pull the plug on its shows in recent months.

Warner Bros Discovery pulled a slew of shows and movies from its streaming service in the US, HBO Max, including high profile series such as Westworld, Love Life, The Nevers, Mrs Fletcher, Here and Now, Vinyl, Moonshot and The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Some titles will be licenced to third-party platforms in the US while there are no plans for others to return in any capacity.

Warner Bros’ controversial decision to scrap the finished Batgirl movie was for the same financial reasons – it was more profitable to get rid of it altogether than to salvage it.

While Warners’ moves on HBO Max annoyed its customers in the US, it was not mirrored in Australia because Warner does not sell directly to local customers. In Australia, the titles which disappeared from HBO Max are distributed through third party streaming services including Binge* and Stan, which have paid licencing fees for those shows.

Disney’s plans to drop those titles are global, which is why Australian audiences will be affected.

Westworld was dumped from its US streaming home, HBO Max.

Disney’s most recent quarter earnings reported a $US659 million loss in its streaming division. It’s an improvement on the previous quarter where it clocked up a $US1.1 billion loss. Disney+ has 157 million subscribers worldwide.

Entertainment companies are under increasing pressure to turn around streaming businesses, which have prioritised growth over profitability.

But it’s not only audiences that will miss out on the vanishing shows and movies, its creators have expressed disappointment at having their work cut with no plans of where it might end up later.

Eliza Clark, the showrunner for the sci-fi series Y: The Last Man, one of the shows set to be dumped, tweeted, “You work on something for years, pour your heart and soul into it, as do hundreds of other artists. Then, it is disappeared.”

The sentiment was echoed by Jack Thornton, the co-writer of comedy thriller The Princess, which starred Joey King, who said he found out about the news via the media.

*Binge is majority owned by News Corp, publisher of this website