Shortly after being reinstated as CEO of The Walt Disney Company, Bob Iger announced Disney would take drastic steps to cut $5.5 billion in costs. Some cost-cutting was achieved by laying off thousands of employees, but Disney is also following a trend started by Warner Bros. Discovery and removing TV shows and movies from its streaming services. The purge began in May and continued last week with several shocking removals.
As spotted by What’s on Disney Plus, a dozen shows and movies vanished from Disney Plus on Friday, June 30. A majority of the removals were Turkish original series, but Disney also yanked the English-language sci-fi movie Crater, which debuted on May 12.
Crater, a new Disney+ original movie written by John Griffin (From) and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez (13 Reasons Why), follows a young boy named Caleb (Isaiah Russell-Bailey) who was raised in a lunar mining colony in the days before he is permanently relocated to a new planet. Before he leaves, he and his friends hijack a rover for one final adventure.
With a 64% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 5.3/10 on IMDb, Crater wasn’t a critical darling, but it sounds like a cute coming-of-age movie with a sci-fi twist. Unfortunately, if you didn’t see it in the seven weeks it was available, you might never see it.
It’s got to be a slap in the face to the cast and crew that worked so hard on the project. If Disney didn’t believe in this movie, then don’t make it. Instead, the creators Disney allowed to bring this story to life are being punished for Disney’s decision-making.
Even more baffling is Disney’s decision to cancel and remove the Freeform series Single Drunk Female from streaming services after a critically-acclaimed second season.
Single Drunk Female stars Sofia Black-D’Elia as a 28-year-old alcoholic trying to get her life on track after hitting rock bottom. The critical response to the TV show has been almost universally positive, and considering just how many commercials I saw for the show during its two-year run, Disney wasn’t skimping on the advertising budget. But now it’s gone forever.
(You can still buy both seasons online for now, but they’re no longer streaming anywhere.)
As frustrating as Netflix’s penchant for canceling its shows after a season or two can be, at least Netflix isn’t deleting those shows after canceling them. You can still watch 1899, Inside Job, and Lockwood & Co., even if there will never be another season.
