By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
The Walt Disney Company has gone through a massive wave of changes over the last few years, but one thing that has been barely noticed is that the company’s Disney+ service has removed hundreds of titles from its lineup.
The changes at Disney started with the hiring of Bob Chapek, who had. the misfortune to guide the company just as the COVID-19 pandemic asserted a death grip on the film industry, movie theatres, and all forms of location-based entertainment, particularly theme parks.
As the world’s largest entertainment conglomerate and largest owner of theme parks, Disney was particularly hard hit.
On the bright side, or so it seemed at the time, consumer adoption of the then-new Disney+ streaming service exploded, and the House of Mouse soon rivalled long-time leader Netflix for total subscribers.
Then came the company’s most recent earnings report, which revealed that Disney+ had lost $1.5 billion, making it a very expensive success. The news helped cause Disney stock prices to fall, and prompted Disney’s board to replace Chapek with former CEO Bob Iger as CEO.
But, before Iger returned, the streaming service was already going through what appears to be a variety of cost-cutting measures, including the cutting of a large swath of programming. This was first reported by the specialty news outlet WhatsOnDisneyPlus.com.
In fact, WODP has been reporting since April that some shows were being dropped by the service, but that’s typical of any streamer. Netflix, for example, is very aggressive about removing shows that don’t provide a timely and sizeable return on investment. That’s especially true for some licensed content, which can be expensive and sometimes awkward to maintain, particularly in the case of Disney’s Marvel franchise and its arrangement with the Sony-owned Spider-Man franchise.
However, in October and November it was noted that process was accelerating at Disney+, causing the analysts at WODP to theorize the move was more about cost cutting than simply a routine pruning of the rosebushes.
“With hundreds of titles being removed in some countries, it has become very apparent that these removals have been done to save money,” said WOPD writer Roger Palmer. “In Disney’s latest quarterly results, it was revealed that the streaming division of the company has lost over $1.5 billion in the last year. It’s also why, later this month, there will be a price rise for Disney+ in many countries, and a new ad-supported tier is being introduced in the United States.
“While Disney might own the majority of these titles, they still cost the company money to have on the platform. Server and data costs do add up, but there will also be residual payments to the cast and crew of these titles,” Palmer added. “So it looks very likely that Disney is going through the viewing data on Disney+ and now removing titles that aren’t being watched enough to warrant the costs of having them on Disney+.”
Palmer does say most of the content he’s seen removed is relatively obscure, but others are well-known shows or films, particularly Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy.
So what is being removed? The list, starting back in April, is quite diverse. First, Disney+ cut some Star Originals shows globally, such as “Big Leap” and “Queens”, most of which were shows that have been cancelled after one season.
Over the past few months the pruning has accelerated, as over 200 titles have been removed from Disney+ in the United Kingdom and Ireland, over 150 titles in Canada, over 100 titles in the Netherlands and Spain, with Australia and New Zealand losing about 40 titles. They include films like Terminal Velocity, The Poseidon Adventure and The Man From Snowy River.
While the trend of removing dozens or hundreds of titles in global markets is new, analysts don’t believe it is a sign that the Disney+ service is in trouble, but rather that Disney, after an expensive rollout of the service, is now doing its best to ‘right size’ the content offerings, balance out the cost vs. revenue picture, and drive the streamer toward profitability.
WhatsOnDisneyPlus does have one major complaint though. Unlike most other streaming services, Disney has no feature that alerts its subscribers about what content is being removed, so viewers typically are unaware of what’s being removed, or how much is being removed.
“Disney+ needs to implement a warning system to inform subscribers,” argues Palmer. “This could be a small yellow warning notice on individual titles, or a single page within the app that has everything leaving in the next month, as other streaming platforms do. Disney even provides a full list of titles leaving Hulu every month; it doesn’t do this for Disney+.”
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