This week, Disney removed a film called Crater from Disney Plus, which had been released on May 12, 2023. This means it was on the streaming platform for just 48 days, or about seven weeks. Disney hasn’t said why, but it seems most likely that it didn’t perform well enough and the company decided to remove it to write down the value of its “content assets”, therefore lowering their taxes. It’s all about the money, and always has been, and there are unfortunate consequences that come with this.
Disney isn’t the only streamer that’s guilty of this – every streaming service, including Netflix and HBO Max (now just Max), has taken shows and movies off their platforms without warning. Willow was cancelled and removed from Disney, as was the well-loved Single Drunk Female from Hulu. HBO pulled Westworld and Snowpiercer. Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies was cancelled and pulled from Paramount Plus just last month. It seems like anything could be pulled at any time, and that sucks.
It’s bad enough that streaming services are cancelling shows left and right because they don’t meet arbitrary sales targets, but when they are pulled from these platforms, many of them disappear forever. A lot of these shows are made for streaming, never aired on cable, and were never physically released. Bigger prestige shows like Westworld and Snowpiercer appeared on cable originally and are more likely to have Blu-ray releases, but those Disney shows are gone. There is no legal way to watch them anymore, and these companies are not interested in even selling you access.
This all brings to mind what my colleague Eric Switzer wrote when the 3DS and Wii U eShop were put to rest. You can’t buy digital games from either of those platforms anymore, which means it’s not possible to access them legally anymore. Since the eShop Exclusives, in particular, are not being sold in any physical form, there is no ethical boundary stopping you from just downloading them and emulating them. It’s not like you’re stealing money out of Nintendo’s pocket, since they’re not going to sell them anymore.
What, exactly, makes this different from streaming a ripped mp4 of a show that’s no longer available anywhere? If I want to watch Willow, it doesn’t seem wrong to just watch it on some random site or torrent it – there is quite literally no other way to watch it. It seems silly for companies to be so anti-piracy when their own business practices are necessitating it. You wouldn’t pirate a car? I would if it wasn’t getting sold anywhere and it didn’t hurt anybody. I’d pirate a show if Disney removed it from its platform for no reason. And I’d pirate a game too, if it wasn’t available in any other way.
As a side note, games do tend to be made available over and over again. While I’m not a fan of nostalgia-mining or the constant remastering and remaking of games, companies are still keeping some popular older games accessible by relaunching them with better graphics, fine-tuned gameplay, and even added scenes. I wish instead of continually making the same games over and over again, companies would just welcome game preservationists with open arms, allowing what they’ve made to be playable for all time. But again, it’s all about money. I wish things were just allowed to exist as they are, accessible as long as people want them. But that wouldn’t maximise profits, would it?