Last year, Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Laszav revealed that they would be taking a number of shows and films from HBO Max and removing them from the service, to write them off for business purposes, because they were considered to be a failure, either with regards to viewing numbers or how they didn’t bring in new subscribers, but are now basically costing them money, paying out for things like residuals, server costs etc.

Since then, Disney made a similar move, removing a number of cancelled shows like “Queens” and “Rebel” from Dinsey’s streaming services worldwide.  At the same time, over the winter, hundreds of titles have been removed from Disney+ worldwide.   And things are going to get even worst, as last week, during Disney’s quarterly investors call, Disney’s CFO Christine McCarthy revealed they would be removing more content from its streaming services, which would include Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, Star+ and Hotstar.

We are in the process of reviewing the content on our DTC services to align with the strategic changes in our approach to content curation that you’ve heard Bob discuss. As a result, we will be removing certain content from our streaming platforms and currently expect to take an impairment charge of approximately $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion. The charge, which will not be recorded in our segment results, will primarily be recognized in the third quarter as we complete our review and remove the content.

An impairment charge is a term used to account for an asset that is no longer as valuable as it may have once been.

Disney hasn’t officially announced what shows or films might be removed from its streaming services.  Unlike most streaming services, Disney+ doesn’t inform subscribers in advance if titles are going to be removed, so it’s generally a case of only noticing something is gone, when it’s no longer available.

However, the French streaming service, Canal+, which is a streaming content aggregator in France, has listed a number of Disney+ and Star+ Originals that have an expiration date of May 26th 2023. (Disponible jusqu’au 26/05).  Which you can see listed on the website, showing the removal date.

There are dozens of shows showing the exact same date on Canal+ that are set to leave, including:

• The Mysterious Benedict Society
• Big Shot
• Willow
• The Making Of Willow
• The One And Only Ivan
• Timmy Failure
• Be Our Chef
• Magic Camp
• Howard
• Pistol
• Dollface
• The Quest
• Earth To Ned
• Y: The Last Man
• The Premise
• Foodtastic
• Stuntman
• Disney Fairy Tale Weddings
• Love In The Time Of Corona
• Everything’s Trash
• Best In Snow
• Little Demon
• Maggie
• The World According To Jeff Goldblum
• Best In Dough
• Wolfgang
• It’s a Dog’s Life With Bill Farmer
• And many more

It’s unknown if these removals are only going to happen in France, or if these are going to be removed from Disney+ worldwide, Hulu in the US and Star+ in Latin America.  But it’s very likely this could be an indication of what’s going to be happening this summer, as many of these shows have either been cancelled or been underperformers.

Currently, we only know that these titles are leaving Disney+ in France, due to the Canal+ showing expiration dates.  So these titles might not necessarily be completely removed globally, but following on from the words of Disney CFO Christine McCarthy at the Investors Call last week, this does seem a logical list of titles to write off.   Though this list of titles almost wipes out the majority of original programming from the past year or so, which is horrible to see, especially if these titles aren’t going to be available to buy on digital platforms or licenced out.   With Disney planning on writing off almost $2 billion dollars worth of content, that’s going to be a lot of shows and films.

We probably might not know if these removals are going to happen until we log onto Disney+ on May 27th 2023.  In the meantime, I’d recommend watching anything on this list that you’ve been wanting to watch in the next week, because there is no guarantee that these will still be there at the end of the month.

I have reached out for comment from Disney regarding this situation.

What do you think of Disney+ removing these shows in France?

Thanks to L’Actu de Disney+ for the tip-off

Roger Palmer

Roger has been a Disney fan since he was a kid and this interest has grown over the years. He has visited Disney Parks around the globe and has a vast collection of Disney movies and collectibles. He is the owner of What's On Disney Plus & DisKingdom. Email: Roger@WhatsOnDisneyPlus.com Twitter: Twitter.com/RogPalmerUK Facebook: Facebook.com/rogpalmeruk

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