Sony Pulls Paid Movies from PS5 Libraries, No Refunds

If you bought Terminator 2, Evil Dead, Total Recall, or any of 551 other Studio Canal films through the PlayStation Store, Sony has some bad news: they're gone come September, and you're not getting a penny back.

Sony emailed affected users this week confirming that as of 1 September 2026, all previously purchased Studio Canal content will be removed from PlayStation video libraries due to expired licensing arrangements. The full list of affected titles is available on the PlayStation website. According to screenshots of the email circulating on social media, Sony offered no apology, no refund, and no alternative. The message simply told users they "will no longer be able to watch" their purchased content.

This is the reality of digital ownership in 2026, and I think it's indefensible. You paid real money for these films. Sony took that money, called it a purchase, and is now telling you the product you bought is being repossessed with nothing in return. Yes, the EULA technically says you're buying a licence, not the content itself. But "technically legal" and "acceptable" are not the same thing, and a company that posted $7.5 billion in profit last year can absolutely afford to compensate customers whose purchases it's deleting.

The timing stings too. This lands in the same week that GTA 6 was confirmed to skip physical media entirely, pushing even more consumers toward digital-only purchases with no fallback. If studios and platform holders want players to trust digital storefronts as the future of buying content, pulling the rug out from under paid libraries with zero compensation is a spectacularly bad way to build that trust. Sony has reversed unpopular decisions before; in 2021, backlash forced a partial reversal on plans to close the PS3 and Vita stores. Whether enough noise gets made over 551 movies to force a similar response here remains an open question, but affected users have until September 1 to find out.