Sony will pull over 500 movies and shows from PlayStation owners’ libraries
Who doesn’t love a good movie? Unfortunately, if you bought your favourite movies digitally on PlayStation, there’s a chance that you’ll lose access to them come this September 1st, 2026. Sony has announced that over 500 films and series, including Terminator 2, Rambo and many others, will no longer be available to watch, due to “licensing agreements.”
It’s not unusual for games to be delisted from online stores. The difference is that if you’ve bought those games, they remain in players’ libraries. You can redownload them whenever you want. These movies, all content from Studio Canal, will just be gone. Sony’s official announcement, which was initially emailed to purchasers but can now be viewed online, makes no mention of any refunds.
“From September 1, 2026, due to our content licensing agreements, you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library,” reads the matter-of-fact statement.
Unsurprisingly, as reported by Kotaku, this has caused quite a stir. Sony stopped selling movies via PlayStation back in 2021, but to effectively remove purchased – not rented – content from PlayStation owners’ libraries is quite a thing.
However, it’s still possible that the proposed deletion won’t go through. Sony was going to pull a raft of Discovery content from consoles back in 2023, but Sony and Discovery worked out a new licensing agreement. Hopefully that’ll happen here.
I’m reminded of P.T., the demo for Hideo Kojima’s cancelled Silent Hills game. Even if you downloaded it at the time, but deleted it later, you’re no longer able to download it. Something similar happened with Concord, though that was an online-only game.
As the PlayStation Terms of Service states “When you purchase or download a Digital Product from the PlayStation Store you can use (it) in the ways described in the licence but you do not own the Digital Product.” Sony has stated that, in the Q4 2025 financial year, 85% of its PlayStation game sales were digital.
Would a major publisher do the same with a digital-only title, one that people had paid real money to own? Almost certainly not. But could they? Yes, and it’s a sobering reminder that digital is not forever.
