The purge has come to Disney, per Deadline. Last year, Warner Bros. began a trend of completely removing series from its HBO Max streaming platform and even all-out canceling completed films in order to save money on its taxes and look better to investors. Now it’s Disney’s turn as the streamer, under new-again CEO Bob Iger, has announced it will remove a plethora of shows from Disney+ and Hulu on May 26. The shows being removed from Disney+ and Hulu include major series that both platforms have dumped a lot of money into, including Willow, Big Shot, Turner & Hooch, The World According to Jeff Goldblum, Y: The Last Man, Mysterious Benedict Society, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, and Dollface. Joining them are a host of other short-lived series, one-off specials, B-grade movies, the kind of content that was being pumped out just to have content when Disney+ started.
Many of the bigger shows should have been winners for the company, especially Willow, which may still have had a second season and that Disney was hoping would be a nostalgic fantasy franchise for it. Instead, it seems that the series underperformed so much that it will be better for Disney to remove it completely from its platforms in order to claim a content impairment charge. That allows Disney to claim them as a tax write-off of $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion, but it also means that it will be impossible to watch most of the shows and movies ever again. With nearly no physical releases this content will drift off into the streaming ether, lost and forgotten.
The move comes as nearly every streaming platform is rethinking its strategy of pouring money into projects nonstop. As we’re not all stuck at home and the early salvos of the streaming wars come to an end, studios are realizing that they probably want to produce content that pulls in subscribers and keeps them instead of just throwing everything at a wall and hoping it sticks. Then again, Netflix’s biggest hits like Squid Game, Bridgerton, and The Witcher are often things that come from its nonstop onslaught of content creation, and it has yet to purge any entirely original series from the platform. Of course, the real losers here are the creatives who worked on these shows whose work is now gone forever along with any residuals that might be built into their contracts, barring the sale of the content to a FAST channel, as Warner Bros. later did with some of its shows.
The full list of soon-to-be-removed TV shows, movies, and documentary series being removed from Disney+ and Hulu is below.
Disney+ and Hulu Shows and Movies to Be Removed
- Big Shot [Disney+]
- Turner & Hooch [Disney+]
- The Mysterious Benedict Society [Disney+]
- The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers [Disney+]
- Willow [Disney+]
- The Making Of Willow [Disney+]
- Diary of a Future President [Disney+]
- Just Beyond [Disney+]
- The World According to Jeff Goldblum [Disney+]
- Marvel’s Project Hero [Disney+]
- Marvel’s MPower [Disney+]
- Marvel’s Voices Rising: The Music of Wakanda Forever [Disney+]
- Y: The Last Man [FX/Hulu]
- Pistol [FX/Hulu]
- Little Demon [FX/Hulu]
- Maggie [Hulu]
- Dollface [Hulu]
- The Hot Zone [Nat Geo/Hulu]
- The Premise [Hulu]
- Love in the Time of Corona [Hulu]
- Everything’s Trash [Hulu]
- Best in Snow [Hulu]
- Best in Dough [Hulu]
- Darby and the Dead [Hulu]
- The Quest [Hulu]
- Rosaline [Disney+]
- Cheaper by the Dozen remake [Disney+]
- The One and Only Ivan [Disney+]
- Stargirl [Disney+]
- Artemis Fowl [Disney+]
- The Princess [Disney+]
- Encore! [Disney+]
- A Spark Story [Disney+]
- Black Beauty [Disney+]
- Clouds [Disney+]
- America the Beautiful [Disney+]
- Better Nate Than Ever [Disney+]
- Weird but True! [Disney+]
- Timmy Failure [Disney+]
- Be Our Chef [Disney+]
- Magic Camp [Disney+]
- Howard [Disney+]
- Earth to Ned [Disney+]
- Foodtastic [Disney+]
- Stuntman [Disney+]
- Disney Fairy Tale Weddings [Disney+]
- Wolfgang [Disney+]
- It’s a Dog’s Life with Bill Farmer [Disney+]
- The Real Right Stuff [Disney+]
- The Big Fib [Disney+]
- Rogue Trip [Disney+]
- More Than Robots [Disney+]
- Shop Class [Disney+]
- Pick the Litter [Disney+]
- Own the Room [Disney+]
- Among the Stars [Disney+]
- Harmonious Live! [Disney+]
- Pentatonix: Around the World for the Holidays [Disney+]