As the new year began, fans noticed films going missing from the Disney Plus streaming library. Movies like Dr. Doolittle, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Home Alone, Home Alone 2, and The Sandlot disappeared from the platform.
Every few years Disney would open the Vault, releasing a classic title to DVD or Blu-Ray before quietly locking it away again for years as a way to build up interest. It was a genius move that many thought would go extinct with the release of Disney Plus. But Disney promised that all its classics would be permanently available to subscribers. That doesn’t apply to every movie on the service, however. Some films clearly aren’t going to live on Disney Plus forever.
Other platforms like HBO or Netflix put out monthly bulletins of content coming and leaving their streaming services each month, but Disney has only focused on new arrivals.
In a statement to Comicbook in November 2019, a Disney Plus spokesperson said, “there will not be a ‘rotating slate’ of licensed movies each month […] With Disney Plus, beloved classics from the Disney vault will now stream in a permanent home, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King — the entire 13-film signature collection — all available on day one.”
Disney Plus has quietly removed movies like The Shaggy Dog and Garfield 2: A Tail of Two Kitties in 2019 and there are films that are already set to leave Disney Plus. According to a report from Bloomberg, a few of the service’s biggest titles, like Black Panther, are currently set to lapse back to Netflix in 2026.Though few titles have disappeared from the service, Disney is also adding more to the Disney Plus library.
