Disney has been pulling content from its sites, Disney+ and Hulu, and plans to dispose of approximately fifty more shows beginning from 26 May.
Titles due to get the chop from Disney+ include: Willow, Dollface, Big Shot, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Stargirl, and Turner and Hooch. Meanwhile, Hulu is set to drop Love in the Time of Corona, Everything’s Trash, Little Demon, The Quest, and Rosaline from its collection.
This shocking development has come as a surprise to many, and was announced during the latest Disney earnings call on 10 May. The switch-up is part of the company’s “strategic changes in [their] approach to content curation,” along with a more honed focus on profitability. During the call, CEO Bob Iger also informed investors that the company expects to raise the price on the ad-free Disney+ tier later this year, “to better reflect the value of our content offerings.”
Earlier this month, it was announced that Disney+ had lost four million subscribers, a decline on the 2.4 million they lost in 2022. A significant number of the losses came from their Hotstar service in India and parts of Asia, which lost streaming rights to Indian cricket matches last year. Also, around 300,000 subscriptions were lost in the US and Canada after subscription prices were raised.
Disney is only the latest media company to be expelling content from its platforms. Just last year, HBO announced it was dropping shows such as Love Life, Westworld, and Minx. At the time, Minx had been greenlit for a second series and had almost finished production.
The removal of these titles can provide attractive write-downs for media companies, but is antagonising creatives who have grown increasingly more frustrated with the size of streaming residuals.
Julia Hart, the director of Stargirl (2020) lamented the purging of her show on Twitter:
John Bickerstaff, a writer on Willow, stated:
All the shows set to be dropped from the services will be available to stream until 26 May. A list of the relevant titles can be found here.
Words by Faye Price
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