Cognition Dissemination: Screw the Digital Disney Vault
It drew immediate groans when Warner Bros. Discovery, under new leadership that assumed their positions last year led by David Zaslav, started culling scripted content for and from HBO Max (which will soon adopt the extremely basic name of “Max”). It was said leadership’s goal to start turning a profit on their main streaming service, which led to cancellations of projects in the works, Batgirl being the biggest among them, and certain titles and movies being removed with little warning. Some were given to free ad-based services like Tubi, and movies were made available for digital rental. Other shows, like Snowpiercer, are still missing in action on streaming services.
It was a peculiar way to devalue a streaming service, but then fortunate that competing services were run by supposedly wiser heads who wished to maintain their archives. That was “then” because, I’m sad to say, removing content ended up being so beneficial for WBD’s bottom line that others are following suit. Paramount did so when they removed shows like Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone and Guilty Party shortly after the start of the year. Now, it’s Disney’s turn.
And they’re going in hard. A laundry list of titles will start being removed from both Disney Plus and Hulu as soon as next Friday, May 26th. Disney Plus shows being removed will include The Mysterious Benedict Society, Willow (which just finished in January), and The World According to Jeff Goldblum (one of the first shows on the service), while shows like Y: The Last Man, Love in the Time of Corona, and The Quest will disappear from Hulu. If this wasn’t bad enough, the list was expanded later to include movies like The Princess (Hulu) and Artemis Fowl (Disney Plus). Considering that Disney Plus has been justifiably criticized for lacking in original content outside Marvel and Star Wars franchise, outside their extensive archive, this is a particularly wild plan to undertake.
It blows chunks that all these services are removing shows, but the existence of a Digital Disney Vault is orders of magnitude worse, for reasons beyond the company saying this wouldn’t happen when Disney Plus launched. At least shows and movies removed from HBO Max and Paramount Plus are available through other means, through digital and physical releases if they aren’t available on streaming services with ads. Not so with a bunch of Disney content. The company has not released any of their original Disney Plus shows and movies through physical and digital means, including Marvel and Star Wars shows that would sell plenty of copies. The same applies to movies like the aforementioned The Princess and Artemis Fowl, alongside others from 20th Century Studios like Barbarian and new Predator installment Prey.
The company is creating a preservation crisis, even if none of the shows and movies being removed were award winners. Disney cannot blame anyone if people pursue torrents to watch a bunch of these when they can’t be bothered to make them available through other means.
These shows and movies have been live on the service for several months, some for over a year, so they aren’t being removed for tax write-offs like the new WBD did in their earliest months. The likely reason here is Disney’s desire to avoid paying residuals to the writers and actors involved with their creation, with the act of freeing up server space and costs being a secondary reason.
It’s a wild move to undertake at this point in time, when the Writers Guild of America has been on strike for nearly three weeks. Here, one key reason why talks between the writers’ union and production studios collapsed was due to the former receiving little in residuals from streaming shows and movies compared to broadcast TV and theatrical films. Actor union SAG-AFTRA could join them, with union heads led by president Fran Drescher unanimously calling for a strike authorization vote ahead of talks with studios set to begin on June 7th. If a deal isn’t reached by June 30th, they’ll strike too.
It’s tempting to start thinking that Disney is a valiant organization during their constant battles with fascist Florida governor Ron DeSantis, which further intensified this week when the company announced the cancellation of a $1 billion development in Florida and subsequently announced an expansion in California instead. But it’s situations like these, and their behind-the-scenes encouragement of scabby behavior to keep showrunners working during the writers’ strike, that remind everyone that they’re equally as soulless as any other faceless corporation. The issue of devaluing their own streaming service should be mitigated when they combine Disney Plus and Hulu in the United States, but it’s obscene to pull content when it’s not available through any other means. And here corporations wonder why piracy is so popular.
About The Author
Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
