A week after its earnings call, Disney has initiated plans to remove programming from its streaming platforms, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The content being removed has been labeled as underperforming and will assist in the conglomerate eliminating almost $2 billion dollars in costs.
“We are in the process of reviewing the content on our DTC services to align with the strategic changes in our approach to content curation,” Disney CFO Christine McCarthy stated on the call last week via Deadline. Today, the first round of removals includes up to 30 titles across TV and film. Some of the titles include Disney+’s revival series, Willow, and FX’s adaptation of Y: The Last Man on Hulu. Both series were canceled after one season.
The full list of titles being removed is below and includes content on Disney+ and Hulu.
Be Our Chef
Best In Dough
Best In Snow
Big Shot
Disney Fairy Tale Weddings
Dollface
Earth To Ned
Everything’s Trash
Foodtastic
Howard
It’s a Dog’s Life With Bill Farmer
Little Demon
Love In The Time Of Corona
Maggie
Magic Camp
The Making Of Willow
The Mysterious Benedict Society
The One And Only Ivan
Pistol
The Premise
The Quest
Stuntman
Timmy Failure
Willow
Wolfgang
The World According To Jeff Goldblum
Y: The Last Man
The new strategy around the company’s streaming services aims to produce lower volumes of content, which the company admits will hit them with an impairment charge of about $1-2 billion dollars. While this loss will not reflect in their balance until the third quarter, the company is also having to handle the loss of around $150 million in severance pay due to last quarter’s massive layoffs. However, the company is on track to exceed its overall savings of around $5 billion dollars.
“When you make a lot of content, everything needs to be marketed,” CEO Bob Iger explained via Deadline. “You’re spending a lot of money marketing things that are not going to have an impact on the bottom line, except negatively due to the marketing costs.”
The same strategy was enacted by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav as he embarked on accumulating $3 billion dollars in savings to complete the merger of steaming platforms HBO Max and Discovery+. Since last April, when the merger was finalized, content on both platforms was either canceled or licensed to other platforms for profit. Mainly on newly-formed Free ad-supported TV channels such as Roku.
These removals also come a week after Iger announced Hulu content would soon merge with Disney+ on one streaming app.