Disney has apparently fallen on hard times.
The entertainment juggernaut with a market cap of $165 billion would have you believe that, anyway. Variety(opens in a new tab) reported that Disney took a $1.5 billion impairment charge for the recent removal of dozens of shows and movies from Disney+ and Hulu, per an SEC filing(opens in a new tab). Shows like Willow and Y: The Last Man were among the content that got culled in late May.
Disney+ and Hulu will purge over two dozen more shows. Here’s the list so far.
In layman’s terms, that basically means that Disney gets a tax write-off from cutting all that content. What’s worse is that the SEC filing said Disney “currently anticipates” further removed content during the rest of the third fiscal quarter of 2023. In other words, don’t be surprised if these services lose even more shows and movies over the coming months.
This is the same tactic Warner Bros. Discovery used last year(opens in a new tab) and both cases paint a somewhat grim future for streaming entertainment. Some of the content that’s being shoved out the door isn’t available in physical form, so it just sort of lives in limbo until companies decide it’s cool to put it back on the streaming service someday, if at all.
Regardless of how this plays out, I don’t think anyone signed up for this when cord-cutting became the norm.
