Netflix Shares Fall 10 Percent After Planning to Cut The Sorcerer's Apprentice From Streaming Service
Shares of movie rental giant Netflix fell 10% before the market opened on Friday. Share prices plunged $23.90 to $209.37 after news that customers would no longer be able to stream the Nic Cage fantasy adventure The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The film, in which Cage plays thousand-year-old sorcerer Balthazar Blake, was a Walt Disney production. Starz Entertainment owns pay-cable rights to movies from Walt Disney Studios and they pulled out of a deal with Netflix to extend those rights to stream a multitude of films, most notably The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Nic Cage as Balthazar Blake
Starz plans to pull The Sorcerer's Apprentice when their deal with Netflix lapses in February. Netflix has undergone changes in the past few months including a heavily publicized fee change that invoked much ire from customers. That didn't rock Wall Street, however, like the news of The Sorcerer's Apprentice parting ways with the online rental company.
Viewers will have to turn elsewhere to see Baltazhar's quest through modern-day Manhattan to give Merlin's successor the fabled Dragon Ring. Some analysts are predicting this market hiccup to be "short-term," but they clearly have never seen The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Netflix to lose Starz, its most valuable source of new movies [LAT]
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