There are a total of 1,794 older movies from Warner Bros., MGM, and Universal which will no longer be available to Netflix users at the stroke of midnight. You can see the full list over at InstantWatcher. Slate's Sam Adams offered up a well-considered list of soon-to-be-unavailable movies to check out in the waning hours of Netflix's "Streamageddon" era. There's a trio of Robert Altman films on his list, a pair of early James Bond flicks, another pair from Bill Wilder, and the always wonderful Gregory's Girl.
All very nice, like eating your classic film vegetables, but personally, we're going to queue up 1948's Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein for old time's sake. Meanwhile, Adams also reports that Netflix has been experimenting with its movie queue interface, pushing out some new looks to a small amount of users. In some cases, Netflix severely limits the sorting options for users, in another test interface, the site is apparently only allowing users to see Netflix-recommended titles.
"The only thing these new options share is that Netflix's customers loathe them," Adams writes.
The kinda good news—Netflix "members who see their queue changed into a list as part of the test and don't like it can contact customer support and request to leave the test and get their old experience back," company spokesman Joris Evers told Slate.
UPDATE: After this story was published, Evers sent PCMag the following statement to clarify what's happening with expiring movie titles on Netflix:
"The vast majority of the titles that expire on Wednesday are older features that were aggregated by Epix. We recently added many great, more recent titles such as ParaNorman (Universal), Hunger Games (Epix), Safe (Epix) and Bachelorette (Weinstein). Tomorrow we will also add MI:2, among many other titles.
"Netflix is a dynamic service, we constantly update the TV shows and movies that are available to our members. We will add more than 500 titles May 1, but we also have titles expiring, this ebb and flow happens all the time."