Starting tomorrow, you won't be able to watch South Park on Netflix and that's not even the half of it. Netflix will be cutting 1,794 titles on May 1, including Dr. No, Goldfinger, Stardust Memories, Kiss Me Stupid, and 15 seasons of South Park.
While the latest cuts are somewhat less dramatic than the ones that took place in 2012 when Netflix's agreement with Starz expired, they'll likely be felt severely by users accustomed to finding obscure, classic titles on the streaming service.
Slate first reported the story, stating that the titles being cut are the result of expiring licensing agreements with studios including MGM, Warner Bros., and Universal.
After it ran a story about the disappearing titles, a Netflix representative contacted The Verge to explain the company's reasoning:
"The vast majority of the titles that expire on Wednesday are older features that were aggregated by Epix. We recently added many great, more recent titles such as ParaNorman (Universal), Hunger Games (Epix), Safe (Epix) and Bachelorette (Weinstein). Tomorrow we will also add MI:2, among many other titles.
"Netflix is a dynamic service, we constantly update the TV shows and movies that are available to our members. We will add more than 500 titles May 1, but we also have titles expiring, this ebb and flow happens all the time."
The Verge noted that the Netflix purge is unrelated to Warner Bros.' own streaming service, which provides classic TV shows and films for $9.99/month. In a Twitter post, the studio states that the titles on Warner Instant Archive are Warner Bros.' only, and that the Warner Bros.' titles being cut from Netflix tomorrow will not be immediately added to their own online catalog.
