Warner Bros Deleted $3.5 Billion in Content: Why Streaming Platforms Are Creating a Film Preservation Crisis

Last updated: February 2026 - This article tracks ongoing content removal from streaming platforms. For latest developments, see the sections on Warner Bros Discovery write-offs and Sony PlayStation library removals below.

When Warner Bros Discovery deleted Batgirl (a completed £90 million film) and removed hundreds of classic Looney Tunes shorts from HBO Max in 2022-2025, much of it became permanently inaccessible overnight.

This wasn't an accident. It was tax strategy.

Preservation used to happen as a side effect of profit.

Studios kept films in vaults because home video turned back catalogues into money. Every VHS or DVD sold meant someone somewhere had a copy. Whether the studio cared or not didn't matter. The copy existed.

As explored in Why Did Mid-Budget Films Disappear?, this backend revenue from home video sales fundamentally changed what studios were willing to risk. Preservation happened as a byproduct of profit.

Streaming broke that.

Platforms keep films available only whilst they drive subscriptions. The moment a title stops justifying server costs or residual payments, it disappears. And unlike physical media, when streaming platforms remove a film, there's no copy on anyone's shelf.

It's just gone.

The problem isn't technical. Digital files don't decay like film stock. The problem is economic. Without the profit motive home video provided, most films have no financially rational reason to remain accessible.

And without physical copies circulating, there's no backup when the platform decides a film isn't worth keeping.

Warner Bros Discovery's $3.5 Billion Content Write-Off Explained

August 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery started removing content from HBO Max at unprecedented scale. Not to license it elsewhere. To claim it as tax write-offs.

Batgirl. Completed £90 million film. Shelved before anyone could see it. Company could write off production cost as loss, but only if they ensured the film would never generate revenue.

That meant never releasing it, never licensing it, never allowing it to be seen. Film was finished, marketed, then buried for tax purposes.

Westworld vanished. Several hundred classic Looney Tunes shorts disappeared, including "What's Opera, Doc?" and "Duck Amuck."

By March 2025, all original Looney Tunes shorts from 1930 to 1969 were completely removed from Max. Entire Cartoon Network back catalogue gone.

Warner Bros. Discovery wrote off approximately £3.5 billion in content. Much of it now inaccessible through legal means.

This wasn't mismanagement. It was strategy.

Content removal eliminates residual payments to creators, accelerates amortisation schedules, claims impairment charges as tax deductions. The maths works. Taking a one-time tax benefit now can be more valuable than maintaining content generating minimal engagement.

Under home video this would have been impossible. Once DVDs existed in circulation, studios couldn't make a film disappear even if they wanted to.

Distributed ownership meant preservation happened automatically, regardless of corporate strategy.

How Streaming Licensing Windows Make Films Disappear

Tax write-offs are dramatic but most content removal happens more quietly.

Licensing economics. Platform decisions.

Streaming platforms license most content rather than owning it. Licenses have expiration dates. When a deal ends, platform decides whether to renew based on viewership and cost.

If a film isn't generating enough engagement to justify licensing fee, it gets dropped.

Rational business. But creates preservation problems.

A film might have small devoted audience, might be culturally significant, might be someone's favourite. None of that matters if engagement metrics don't justify cost.

Early 2025, Warner Bros. uploaded over 30 films to YouTube. Free, ad-supported, often poor quality. Bizarre selection. The Science of Sleep and The Mission alongside Pluto Nash. Most weren't available on Max, Warner Bros.' own platform.

This is preservation limbo.

Technically accessible. Ad revenue might cover server costs. But YouTube's compressed quality, lack of special features, algorithmic burial mean these aren't being preserved in any meaningful sense.

They're warehoused in digital bargain bins, generating minimal revenue whilst occupying legal grey area preventing proper restoration or boutique releases.

Neither proper preservation nor complete loss. Third state: accessible yet abandoned.

Sony Removing Purchased Content from PlayStation Libraries (2023)

Perhaps most troubling is what happens to content users thought they owned.

December 2023, Sony announced it would remove over 1,300 seasons from PlayStation users' libraries. Not just from store. Erased from accounts where users had already paid for "permanent" access.

Users clicked "Buy" not "Rent." Paid full price. Content appeared in "My Library" with no expiration indicated.

But when licensing deal between Sony and Discovery ended, Sony announced it would delete content from user libraries entirely.

Backlash forced Sony to postpone deletion, granting temporary 30-month extension. But threat was real and "solution" was merely delay.

Proving that digital "ownership" offers no genuine protection when platforms decide content isn't worth keeping.

Unthinkable in physical era. Once you bought a DVD, studio couldn't come to your house and take it back. Your ownership was absolute. Worst they could do was stop manufacturing new copies.

If you buy a 4K UHD, you buy a Blu-ray, it's on your shelf, it's yours. No company is going to break into your house and take it from you and repossess it. It's yours and you own it. That's never really the case with any form of digital distribution.

What you already owned remained yours.

Digital platforms reversed this entirely. "Buying" digital content means buying licence to access content platform controls. When that licence is revoked for any reason, your purchase becomes worthless.

Why Professional Archives Aren't Enough

Professional film archives do essential work. BFI National Archive, Library of Congress, Cinémathèque Française. Climate-controlled vaults, chemical analysis on degrading stock, restorations costing hundreds of thousands.

When Scorsese's Film Foundation restores a classic, result is superior to any home video release.

Boutique labels continue this commercially. Criterion, Arrow, Eureka, Kino Lorber fund 2K and 4K restorations through collector editions. Scholarly supplements, contextual essays, director commentaries.

Criterion release represents preservation as curation. Not just saving the film but presenting it with historical context and analytical depth.

This professional preservation is more rigorous than anything video shop era provided. Scratched DVD in someone's attic isn't archival preservation. Just a copy that hasn't been thrown away yet.

But professional preservation is necessarily selective.

Archives prioritise canonical works. Films deemed culturally or historically significant. Boutique labels release what collectors will buy. Established classics, cult favourites, recognised auteurs.

Both operate under resource constraints. Can't preserve everything.

Leaves vast middle ground. Films that aren't masterpieces but aren't worthless. Films mattering to small audiences but not to history. Modest genre pictures, underseen dramas, quirky comedies, niche documentaries.

The bulk of what was actually produced.

Physical media's distributed ownership preserved these accidentally. When ten thousand people bought a DVD, preservation happened by default. No committee evaluated cultural significance. No label assessed commercial viability.

It existed because people owned it.

When only a platform controls access, preservation requires deliberate action. Deliberate action is always selective. Someone has to decide a film merits effort and cost of maintaining it in catalogue.

For vast majority of films (the ones that aren't classics, aren't profitable, aren't even particularly good but might matter to someone), that decision will be "no."

Professional preservation saves peaks. Physical media saved plateau. Streaming saves what drives subscriptions.

Everything else is at risk.

The Orphan Works Trap

Physical media's distributed preservation was especially critical for abandoned films.

British Library estimates 40% of all copyrighted works are orphaned. Rights holders can't be identified or located. For film, proportion is likely higher.

These "orphan works" create legal trap. Archivists can't restore or digitise without permission. When rights holder is unknown, permission is impossible to obtain.

Result: legal paralysis whilst films deteriorate.

According to Duke University, orphan films include newsreels, actuality footage, silent films, experimental works, home movies, independent documentaries, political commercials, educational films.

Significant portion of twentieth-century cultural record.

Physical media bypassed this through decentralised preservation. Widespread VHS and DVD ownership meant films remained accessible even after studios withdrew support.

Consumer ownership operated as distributed backup. Redundancy streaming platforms can't replicate.

Copyright terms lasting 70+ years after author's death or 95 years for corporate works mean most twentieth-century films remain locked under copyright long after anyone profits.

Without physical copies circulating, these films simply vanish from legal accessibility.

The Underground Archive

Would be disingenuous to pretend that when platforms remove content, it truly vanishes.

Piracy exists. Private collectors maintain extensive digital libraries. Torrent sites archive abandoned films.

Practically speaking, much "lost" content remains accessible through unofficial channels.

Piracy provides form of distributed backup. Mirrors home video grey market in some ways. Bootleg VHS circulated for decades. DVD copying was widespread.

Digital distribution cuts both ways. If files can be deleted centrally, they can also be copied and distributed decentrally.

This underground archive operates outside corporate control, sometimes outside corporate awareness. Preserves films studios abandoned, platforms delisted, that exist in legal limbo.

For researchers, archivists, obsessive collectors, these unofficial sources are sometimes the only way to access certain works.

But piracy exists in legal and curatorial limbo.

These copies can't be restored to archival standards. Can't be studied institutionally without legal risk. Can't be screened publicly. Can't generate revenue funding new work or supporting people who made them.

Most importantly, can't be discovered through legitimate channels. Film might exist on torrent tracker somewhere but if you don't already know it exists and where to look, you'll never find it.

Underground archive serves people who know what they're looking for. Doesn't help discover what you didn't know you wanted.

More fundamentally, relying on piracy as preservation strategy means accepting most of cinema's history exists in legal grey area, accessible only to people with technical knowledge and willingness to break law.

That's not preservation system. That's proof legitimate system has failed.

Also fragile. Torrent sites get shut down. Hard drives fail. Person maintaining rare film archive might lose interest or run out of storage.

Underground archive is preservation of last resort. Keeps content technically accessible whilst removing economic incentive that sustained creation of new work.

Survival mechanism for cultural memory, not sustainable alternative.

Consumer as Archivist

Physical media turned consumers into inadvertent archivists. Each DVD purchase contributed to distributed preservation network.

This wasn't intentional. People bought films to watch them, not preserve cinema history. But collective result functioned as cultural insurance.

When studios stopped supporting a film, it didn't disappear. Copies remained in collections, libraries, used bookstores, online marketplaces. Films could be rediscovered, exchanged, gifted, studied independently of corporate interests.

Decentralisation was fundamental to preservation.

Streaming recentralised film access. When content is removed, users can't access or preserve it legally. Platform controls whether film exists in accessible form.

This recentralisation puts least commercially valuable films at greatest risk.

Studios preserve what's profitable. Archives preserve what's culturally canonical. But vast middle (films neither blockbusters nor masterpieces but still representing cultural memory) have no structural protection.

What Delayed Discovery Means Now

Most dangerous consequence of streaming's economics is what happens when interest in a film arrives late.

Under home video, delayed discovery was monetisable. Film could build audience slowly over years or decades. Each new fan represented potential sale. Time generated value.

Streaming inverts this. Discovery that doesn't happen rapidly and at scale has no value to platforms. If film gains audience years after release but licensing window has closed, renewed interest can't restore access.

Film remains unavailable.

Without physical copies circulating, no shelves, no catalogues, no used DVD bins, delayed interest becomes futile.

Discovery without availability equals loss.

Particularly cruel because films benefiting most from time are exactly ones streaming economics punishes most severely. Unconventional works, films ahead of their era, productions that initially confused audiences.

These needed slow circulation physical media provided. Streaming's rapid turnover doesn't allow for delayed appreciation.

What You Can Do

Home video era's accidental preservation system is gone. Replacement isn't different preservation system. It's no system at all.

Just corporate decisions about what's worth keeping available this quarter. No mechanism to catch what falls through.

Boutique labels like Criterion, Arrow, Kino Lorber, Vinegar Syndrome keep releasing carefully curated editions. Often funding restorations through collector sales. Prove old logic still works at smaller scale.

Delayed discovery can generate revenue when people can buy films outright.

But these serve niche market. Can't preserve all of cinema. Reach is limited. Physical media no longer standard distribution. Exception, luxury, collector's pursuit.

For most films, once streaming window closes, there's no plan. No boutique label will rescue them. No archive will prioritise them.

They'll simply cease to exist in any accessible form.

Accidental preservation is over. What comes next depends on whether enough people are willing to preserve films intentionally.

Here's how you can help:

• Buy physical media when available. Each purchase signals demand, helps justify future releases.
• Support boutique labels like BFI, Arrow, Criterion, Eureka. Purchases directly fund restoration work.
• Join or donate to archives like BFI National Archive or The Film Foundation.
• Advocate for orphan works reform. Copyright law needs updating to allow preservation of abandoned works.
• Spread awareness. Most people don't realise how precarious film preservation has become.

Streaming era offers convenience and access. Doesn't offer permanence.

That requires us to care on purpose.

Christopher Bray

Founder & Engineer

Engineering open algorithms to map the invisible connections of cinema. I build discovery tools that look beyond streaming catalogs to ensure film history isn't lost to the algorithm.

Last Watched: The Good Neighbour (2016) ★★★☆☆

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