Explained: Why did Disney+ remove Crater 7 weeks after its release?

Crater is on its way out of Disney+. The sci-fi adventure film, which hit the streamer on May 12, 2023, has been removed just under two months after its premiere. As per Whats On Disney Plus.com, the new flick was pulled off the database on June 30. To note, the firm did away with more than two dozen content titles from its streamers, Disney+ and Hulu back in May.

However, the culling of Crater from Disney+ has sent the industry into a tizzy. That is because the 105-minute-long movie was shown the door within just seven weeks of its release.

Made on a stellar budget of $53.4 million, the project was being developed at 20th Century Fox since 2017. However, the development of the film was put on hold after the studio was acquired by Disney. It wasn't until 2021 that cameras started rolling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Los Angeles.

Upon release, Crater was received pretty well by the critics, but it failed to gather steam among subscribers. Wegotthiscovered.com analyzed that Disney’s almost non-existent promotion of the movie is one of the primary reasons behind its removal.

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Veteran entertainment journalist explains why Crater and many others were removed from Disney+

To recall, at the end of May, Disney pulled the plug off an astonishing 27 titles due to “strategic changes in our approach to content curation,” as said by the company’s CFO, Christine McCarthy. At the time, projects like Willow, Dollface, The Mysterious Benedict Society, and the 2020 adventure/drama The One and Only Ivan were killed off.

While that accounted for roughly $1.5 billion dollars, another wave of removal followed a month later. This was a smaller one (and included Crater), with the culled content being valued at $400 million dollars, stated Whats On Disney Plus.com.

The portal, while expressing surprise at Crater’s removal, added that the move was probably because the film underperformed miserably and was a costly affair to make. Meanwhile, in their article, Wegotthiscovered.com emphasized Disney’s focus on new plans for content curation and profit as the main reason for the step.

They quoted Entertainment journalist Matthew Belloni (via Puck) as saying:

“The mechanics are interesting here. First, many seem to think that artist residuals are the cause of the purge. Not really. Residuals make up a real but relatively small part of the cost of putting shows and movies on streamers. Such a small part, in fact, that the Writers Guild is on strike to improve them.”

“The major costs here are the license fees that must be paid by the distributor (Disney+ or Hulu, in this case) to the owner of the content. We may think of these shows as just sitting on a service, waiting to be discovered at 3 a.m. by your stoned cousin. But sitting on a streamer is the same thing, from a licensing perspective, as if the show were being syndicated on TBS (Turner Broadcasting System) or sold into a foreign territory. Disney+ is an exhibition, and fees must be paid. That’s the case even if the owner of the content is also Disney (or an affiliate), which must at least pretend to engage in an arms-length transaction," he added.

Hence, like any other media company, Disney too monitors the ratings of its shows and movies. And when it comes to lessening the residual payments, low-performers like Crater are the first to go.