It was inevitable.
Two months ago, Disney+ debuted a new sci-fi movie titled Crater. Today, you can no longer watch that movie on the platform.
It’s not alone. Recently, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies was removed from Paramount+, just 3 weeks after the end of its first, and presumably only, season. Clearly, it was not the one that they wanted*. And there’s a laundry list of things that have gotten the axe from Max courtesy of Warner write offs and content culling. Oh, and don’t forget Disney+’s own Willow series.
*I couldn’t resist.
And don’t think it stops here for Disney+. In May, then-Disney-CFO Christine McCarthy announced that they would be “removing certain content from streaming platforms.” The Hollywood Reporter says that Disney shed over 70 projects for $1.5 billion in writeoffs earlier in the year, and those numbers are going to grow larger over the coming months.
As for Crater, it starred McKenna Grace and Scott Mescudi, more commonly known as Kid Cudi. Chances are, like me, you didn’t hear about it at all until it was gone, so here’s a description and the trailer to blue ball you on ever watching it.
“Crater” is the story of Caleb Channing (Russell-Bailey), who was raised on a lunar mining colony and is about to be permanently relocated to an idyllic faraway planet following the death of his father (Mescudi). But before leaving, to fulfill his dad’s last wish, he and his three best friends, Dylan (Barratt), Borney (Hong) and Marcus (Boyce), and a new arrival from Earth, Addison (Grace), hijack a rover for one final adventure on a journey to explore a mysterious crater.
Much like Crater, another Disney+ series titled Earth to Ned was rather quietly removed from the platform in May. Head writer Eliza Skinner said this to The Hollywood Reported of the situation:
We have no idea how to plan ahead in any direction because it’s very hard to tell what’s going on. If you go into a museum, no one says, ‘People don’t stop at this painting for very long anymore — let’s throw it in the trash.’ Or if you did, we would all have to assume, ‘Well, that painting is worthless.
Eliza Skinner
On the one hand, she and other creators are right to be miffed that their work is being unceremoniously axed without so much as a hard copy for them to keep, gone an ephemeral. On the other hand, streaming platforms aren’t museums, they’re businesses, and they’re seemingly quite bad at generating money. One might make the argument that such media should, when written off, be added and released into the public domain with an option for the company in question to pick things back up with a modified name later (look, I really want Symbionic Titan and Megas XLR back, okay?). But since most companies want to hold a vicegrip on IP while simultaneously being able to consign it to the trash bin of history, it’s not likely to happen.
Source: Decider
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