Sony pulls 551 movies buyers paid for, blaming its licensing deals
On September 1, 2026, Sony will erase 551 StudioCanal titles, including Terminator 2 and The Deer Hunter, from the libraries of PlayStation customers who paid to "buy" them. Its notice blames "content licensing agreements," and no refund is mentioned.
Affected titles include Terminator 2, Total Recall, Rambo: First Blood, and The Deer Hunter; Sony's message says the content "will be removed from your video library."
Readers noted the pattern: Amazon remotely deleted Orwell's 1984 from Kindles in 2009, and Sony itself shipped a DRM rootkit on music CDs back in 2005.
The films you bought are scheduled for deletion
Sony has told PlayStation customers that on September 1, 2026 it will pull 551 movies and TV episodes licensed from StudioCanal out of their accounts, among them Terminator 2, Total Recall, Rambo: First Blood, and The Deer Hunter. The notice says the titles "will be removed from your video library" and names "content licensing agreements" as the reason. Buyers paid to "buy" these films rather than rent them, and the notice mentions no refund. As Reclaim The Net points out, the terms of service buyers clicked always allowed this: the word "buy" on the storefront never carried permanent ownership.
The thread has watched this movie before
Sony's disregard for the buyer struck one reader as an old habit.
"Sony literally distributed a rootkit in the guise of DRM for Audio CDs back when piracy meant CD-R distribution." — a reader recalling the 2005 Sony BMG scandal
Another pinpointed when the wider lesson first landed, citing Amazon's 2009 remote deletion of Orwell's 1984 from Kindles.
"…that's when most of us first realized that the digital media being purchased doesn't really belong to you." — a reader who points back to the Kindle 1984 recall
One asked why film purchases never followed music, doubting large video files get widely shared anyway.
"I'm surprised movies haven't yet moved to DRM free on purchases the way music did on iTunes back in 2009." — a reader skeptical that big movie files get shared
The split isn't over whether Sony is within its rights, since the terms plainly say it is; it's over whether a store should print "buy" beside something it can erase. For buyers left holding deleted purchases, the thread's counsel was blunt.
"You've already paid for it. Just download it from somewhere else with a clean conscience." — a hobbyist programmer and language author
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