Another month brings another opportunity for titles to fly under radar as they are removed from the service. Starting August 1st, 2021, X-Men (2000) and Fantastic Four (2005) will be streaming on NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock. X-Men was removed July 1st and Fantastic Four left this morning.
Gulliver’s Travels appears to be following the recent, unfortunate pattern set by Ramona and Beezus (2010) which streamed for only 1.5 months before being pulled and heading to Hulu. It’s since left Hulu and gone to Prime Video with no return date in sight. Due to Disney’s inability or refusal to reel in the countless pre-existing contracts left by 20th Century Fox, Disney+ continues to sport a volatile, unreliable, and unsatisfactory Fox library. EDIT: As predicted Gulliver’s left.
Though people are frustrated that films are leaving the Disney+ service, subscribers are more upset with the lack of warning about a title that leaves the service. Disney+ is, for the most part, excellent at advertising when a title will be arriving onto Disney+. However, they remain the only major service to remove titles without warning which violates consumer trust and best practices. Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and even most recently, HBO Max all have leaving soon tabs. Streamers need to be informed about where their favorite content is heading and when it is leaving.
Typically, Disney-owned films streaming on Peacock only live on that service for a month or two before being removed again and vanishing from the Streamosphere. We believe X-Men and Fantastic Four will head to Starz later this year as part of this 8-year-old library deal. It sucks not having the Marvel films in one place like most international countries.
Disney should not be adding titles that can’t stream at least 1 year either. Losing Gulliver’s stings for this reason. Losing Fantastic Four is a disappointing situation as both this film and X-Men were added last summer for the “Summer of Streaming” event. It’s been noticed that Disney is recycling titles a tiny batch of films – many of last summers “highlights” have already been removed including The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and most of what is coming as part of this year’s summer event is content that had already been streaming on Disney+ early 2020. We can also confirm that later this year X-Men Days of Future Past (2014) will be leaving and heading to HBO.
As we’ve been saying for a long time – Disney+ is not even close to “out of the woods” yet in the USA. The deals rage on. As always we are the best site when it comes to proving this information – we have the most complete list of expiration dates of titles on other services as well as record of titles removed along with the reason and return timetable. Not only that, we have a new page that lists the year’s films added from both Disney and Fox sides. None of this paints a pretty picture.
Gregory Bertrand is a film and television enthusiast. His degree in Early Childhood Education is from Saint Cloud State University and he’s currently teaching in a school. When he isn’t shaping young minds, he spends his time researching, analyzing, and documenting Walt Disney contractual obligations while streaming a slew of old and original content.
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.
