Are you a Disney+ subscriber and fan of the animated baseball film, Everyone’s Hero? Bad news! It’s a… month of the year, so Disney removed a Fox film. If you’ve noticed that this year has been particularly bad about this – so have we! If you’re following our “Annual Films Added Fox vs Disney” (we need a better title) page, you too can marvel at how 7 of the Fox films added THIS year have also been removed THIS year. That accounts for ~1 recently-added film a month. 15 Fox titles have been removed this year overall.
As we do every month, we remind you of the way Disney removes titles without warning (the only streaming service to do so), continuing to damage subscriber trust.
As the film JUST came from HBO prior to Disney+ we can predict it’s next stop will be a year at Starz. We don’t know that for sure, but when we find out we’ll update our one-of-a-kind Expiration Dates page with its expiry date. As a result of this title being the 2nd Fox title released in 2006 to get pulled quickly after getting added, we suspect additional 2006 Fox titles are on their way out. Aquamarine and Ice Age: Meltdown – look out…
Now comes the ranty explanation since we often see new people asking “didn’t Disney say titles wouldn’t be removed?” YES! And also no.
“Why can’t Disney stream Fox films? I heard outside USA they have hundreds!”
-Many subscribers
Disney USA has absolutely no control over their 20th Century Fox library, with competitors Starz, Prime Video, Epix, and HBO passing the films around endlessly and frequently. Fox (prior to Disney) left an enormous mess of licensing and contracts that stretch out multiple years yet! It’s a tangled web that would make Spider-Man jealous. Library deals everywhere – HBO, Starz, Prime Video.
There’s a deal with Epix, which is the worst because they sublicense their content to every OTHER service imaginable including YouTube, Roku, Peacock, Paramount+, in turn causing great fluctuations in where Fox titles are available, over-saturating and overexposing them all at once. It’s because of this habit of Epix that Netflix severed their relationship 6 years ago – they didn’t like Epix lessening the value of their library by streaming it everywhere. Many Fox films overlap on multiple services simultaneously because of this.
So, again, we express our monthly concerns about the content team’s decisions. Echoing our recent comments during the removal of short-lived Ramona & Beezus, Gulliver’s Travels, Flicka 2, etc. – why are you like this?
You do harm to Disney+ reputation with these secret removals that were not supposed to be a monthly trend and are insanely easy to avoid.
Prior to launch we were told by the then-Disney+ execs that UNLIKE other services Disney’s library would be stable on Disney+. Not rotating. People rejoiced.
Then they backed off, as if they’d only just been informed by their lawyers of “pre-existing deals” and clarified that “very few” titles would have to come and go for pre-existing contracts. That too is untrue. Multiple titles a month leaving from the service with the smallest USA library of the majors is not “very few.”
Here is the current list of “removed titles from our popular page, aptly referred to as “Titles Removed From Disney+“
How Can Content Team Stop This?
As we’ve said now at least 15393 times over the past 2 years.
You are not Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc. You are better than them! This is one thing that was supposed to set you apart. Please stop adding Fox films and removing them every 3-5 months after.
When the films are “free” for at least 1-2 years go ahead. If the situation is this bad, make deals. You proved with Disney content you could buyout deals for Pixar, Disney Animated Canon, Marvel, and Star Wars… but VERY noticeably have done next to NONE of that with Fox films. It’s been 2 years now. Buyout deals left behind by Fox or alter them to allow titles to stream non-exclusively.
Stop adding them, removing them, and forcing the news sites to write these tired articles and stories bemoaning another “stealth” removal of another Fox title. Pretty please?
Also, is it just me or are they starting to pull more titles mid-month instead of just on the 1st? Can there be no rest for us tired, Disney+-library-following journalists? See you October 1st!
Are you sad Everyone’s Hero is gone? Do you think Disney will ever stop adding titles for short periods instead of not adding them at all?
Drew Ryan is a film, TV, and Disney geek. He has degrees in English, Student Personnel Administration, and Library & Information Science from Lawrence University, Concordia University-Wisconsin, and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Interested in the minutia and licensing of streaming service content, he is always publishing lists, suggestions, and advocating for Disney’s missing library to be added to Disney+. Drew subscribes to Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max, and Paramount+. You can find him waxing nostalgic over classic Disney Channel or geeking out over Marvel, CW shows, & Disney on Twitter.
