We live in a world where you rarely own the media on your console. Case in point, 550+ movies are being removed from the PlayStation video library. That means even if you bought them, you won’t be able to watch them.
Let’s get down the the specifics. All of the movies being removed from PlayStation’s video store are StudioCanal. Why? Because the content licenses have expired, thus : “the content ‘will be removed from your video library’”, says Sony.
Here’s just a few of the movies being taken down: Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut, Attack the Block, Blue Valentine, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Cliffhanger, Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, Four Lions, Highlander, Hot Fuzz, Paddington, Paddington 2, Pan’s Labyrinth, Rambo: First Blood, Rambo III, Room, Saint Maud, Shaun the Sheep Movie, Silver Linings Playbook, Source Code, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Total Recall, Train to Busan, Under the Skin, and You Were Never Really Here
If you’d like the full list of movies and tv shows being removed, check here.
Back in 2021, Sony announced it would stop selling and renting movies and TV shows on the PlayStation store. But it also said users would be able to continue to access all the content they had bought.
In 2022, PlayStation users in Germany and Austria lost access to purchased StudioCanal content. The Verge reported at the time that the removal affected 314 titles in Germany and 137 in Austria, and that it came exactly one year after Sony ended movie and TV purchases through PlayStation Store.
Then in 2023, Sony planned to remove purchased Discovery content from US PlayStation accounts, including more than 1,300 seasons of TV. That one was later reversed after updated licensing arrangements, with Sony posting that the planned Discovery removal would no longer happen.
This does mean there’s hope for the StudioCanal content. But probably not a lot.
Sony, of course, is covered on a legal front: the usual jargon that you and me probably didn’t read makes it clear that you are only buying a license to access the content, and that said content can be removed due to licenses expiring etc.
But none of that makes it any less bloody annoying, does it? Nor is it any consolation to somebody who has spent their hard-earned cash on movies and TV shows they love watching.
