Two notable Marvel films from the mid-2000s were mysteriously removed from Disney Plus at the beginning of December. The two Tim Story directed Fantastic 4 films, Fantastic 4 (2005) and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) vanished like Susan Storm on a bad day.

The films were made by 20th Century Fox and due to Disney’s acquisition of the company they own the rights to those films. But now they were taken down without warning. When you search “Fantastic 4” all you get is the 1994 Fantastic 4 TV series, the 2006 Fantastic Four TV series, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Toy Story 4 and of course the infamous 2015 Fant4stic.

The removal of these two films brings up three important points.

The first being that Disney does indeed remove content similar to how Netflix does, except that Disney has full control. Netflix usually licenses content from other companies to appear on their platform, which is why things tend to come and go. But Disney will potentially do this practice in order to entice people to buy the DVD/Blu-ray if they really really want to see it. It’s a digital version of the Disney Vault.

Second point is that perhaps they have already begun development for the MCU’s version of the iconic team and slowly want viewers to forget the past versions. They will probably remove Fant4stic at a later date due to it being more recent. But that’s just speculation at this point.



The third point is how much of Fox’s library do they really own? There is of course the lawsuit over the rights to the Predator franchise, so maybe there are some legal issues that lead to their removal. It’s too early to tell at this point.

It is a shame that these films are gone. Despite being dated films that were riding the success of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man they still have some charm. Especially since this was Chris Evans‘ first time in the Marvel Universe before Captain America.

Source: ComicBook.com