With today marking the official beginning of the Disney Plus Purge where a large number of shows and movies will be dropped from the viewing platform, the action has plenty of customers wondering what they’re paying for, which is a legitimate question. However, it might be possible that this move isn’t all that bad.
On the chopping block covered by WGTC just last week, Willow, Stargirl, Black Beauty, Magic Camp, and Wolfgang are among just a few of the titles dropped from Disney Plus. As part of the purge because of the Hulu merge, that streaming platform will lose The Quest, Darby and the Dead, Everything’s Trash, Dollface, and Little Demon from its collection along with a slew of others.
As WGTC has previously reported, Disney decided that there was no need to keep and store titles on their platform that no one was watching. It would appear that as soon as they heard of the purge and what was specifically going to be dropped, that’s when those titles started to matter to the customers again. As we all know, some titles start off hot but fade to obscurity as the initial rush dies down and new things come along.
Willow creator and showrunner Jonathan Kasdan was in denial at first when the news dropped that his show was going to be canceled after only one season. However, he quickly changed his tune when he found out that it was true and that it was going to be a part of the purge.
I’ve been quiet on this news that #Willow is leaving @DisneyPlus ’cause… I’m kinda into it. I grew up at a time when @Disney movies were periodically re-released and not available to own, and it made them… more special. I worry about many things…
— Jon Kasdan (@JonKasdan) May 22, 2023
Then, he added…
… but NONE of them are that #Willow will never be available again, either on @DisneyPlus or perhaps… someplace else, & ya never know where that could lead… stranger things have happened. So grateful for all the love and enthusiasm; it’s truly what keeps these worlds alive.
— Jon Kasdan (@JonKasdan) May 22, 2023
It’s not as if we haven’t seen this before. Disney Fandom explains the Disney Vault as an actual process in an actual place where films that it had released would be taken off the market and placed in the vault until an unspecified time in the future. If you were lucky, you bought a copy and were able to watch it on the VCR any time you wanted. If you weren’t lucky, you had to wait until the next release.
This gave new generations a fresh appreciation for films that they might have heard or read about but they weren’t around to watch. When those movies were released again, it was a special occasion — an entirely new event for kids to enjoy and their parents to enjoy all over again.
Disney isn’t going to throw these titles away. That would just be ludicrous. The lucrative move here is that those titles will be archived, and at some time in the future, a new generation of viewers will be able to enjoy them as if being released for the first time. The purge actually brings back the days of the vault, and those titles will, at some time, see the light of day again — just not for now.
