Disney’s Upcoming Content Purge Takes ‘Willow,’ ‘Big Shot,’ More

Disney+ and Hulu subscribers may want to finish watching some shows soon.

Disney has reportedly decided to purge select content from Disney+ and Hulu globally in an attempt to lower company expenditure.

Some of the content Disney would be removing from its streaming services doesn't have physical copies to resume watching them.

Disney+ Hulu Content Purge Details

Disney has allegedly decided to remove select content from Disney+ and Hulu from global consumption on May 26 due to the costs the company incurs from keeping them available on their streaming services. According to Collider's report, the move is the result of a content impairment charge of $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion, which it announced during the recent earnings call.

Disney decided to remove "Willow" and "Bigshot" from its Disney+ streaming platform, while "Y: The Last Man" and "Dollface" from Hulu will also suffer the same fate. What's interesting is that "Willow" was still releasing new episodes as early as March; Disney has effectively canceled the show despite it releasing new episodes as recently as March, per Mashable.

For context, Disney released "Willow," a show based on George Lucas' forgotten creation, on Disney+ on Nov. 30, 2022.

According to a report from The Wrap, Disney would also remove the following shows from Disney+:

1. "The Mysterious Benedict Society"
2. "Turner & Hooch"
3. "The Making of Willow"
4. "Just Beyond"
5. "The World According To Jeff Goldblum"
6. "The One and Only Ivan"
7. "Timmy Failure"
8. "Be Our Chef"
9. "Magic Lamp"
10. "Howard"
11. "Earth to Ned"
12. "Foodtastic"
13. "Stuntman"
14. "Disney Fairy Tale Weddings"
15. "Wolfgang"
16. "It's A Dog's Life With Bill Farmer"

Aside from "Dollface" and "Y: The Last Man," Here is the list of shows Diney will be removing from Hulu on May 26:

1. "Pistol"
2. "The Quest"
3. "The Hot Zone"
4. "Maggie"
5. "Little Demon"
6. "the Premise"
7. "Love In The Time Of Corona"
8. "Everything's Trash"
9. "Best In Snow"
10. "Best in Dough"

Disney's Cost-Cutting Measures

Disney is the latest media company to purge content from its streaming services to lower costs as the industry rethinks its costs and strategy in a post-pandemic world with a renewed focus on profitability, per Deadline. Disney returning CEO Bob Iger also took notice of the losses related to maintaining years-old content from server space to licensing and residuals and decided to cut them loose since they're not worth keeping in terms of profitability.

"We realized that we made a lot of content that is not necessarily driving sub-growth, and we're getting much more surgical about what it is we make. So as we look to reduce content spend, we're looking to reduce it in a way that should not have any impact at all on subs," Iger said in the latest earnings call.

To lessen costs, Disney also decided to merge Disney+ content with Hulu's to form a one-experience app sometime in 2023 that would serve both advertisers and subscribers. The resulting app would give a "more unified streaming experience" by having flagship content from one streamer be present on the other, per The Nerd Stash.