Disney Plus stealth movie deletions frustrate some subscribers

Disney Plus, the massive movie streaming service launched in November, has and will continue to receive a number of new content additions over coming months and years. Disney has already announced a large list of originals that it has planned for its streaming service, but less spoken about are some deletions that subscribers have noticed. The reasons for the movie removals are unclear.

A Reddit user by the handle of "Orikon" recently published a post on the DisneyPlus subreddit detailing the handful of movies that Disney removed from its service in January. The deletions apply to the US market and were discovered by comparing the most recent (January 2020) list of Disney+ movies with a previous version, according to the user.

Some of the deleted movies aren't something many users are likely to notice, including ones like Flicka and Strange Magic, but others are fairly large films that users may be disappointed to see disappear, including Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and the first two Home Alone movies.

The full list of removed Disney Plus movies in the US, according to the Reddit post, are:

- Home Alone

- Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

- The Sandlot

- Dr. Dolittle

- Flicka

- The Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

- Strange Magic

- The Wonderful World of Disney: Magical Holiday Celebration

These deletions are said to follow other similar quiet removals that involved Garfield 2, Shaggy Dog, Mickey Three Musketeers, and White Wilderness. Overall, that's a dozen movies quietly deleted from the Disney Plus service. One Redditor claims that Disney's customer service told them some movies had been removed for 'technical reasons,' but nothing has been publicly stated. It's possible that licensing deals play a role in these deletions and that the movies will eventually return.