Disney+ Children’s Profiles Eliminate Almost All Rated ‘G’ Films - How to Restore Them
Until today, Disney+ made it easy for parents to set up a kids’ profile. By signifying the younger viewing age, the service simply limited content to child-friendly G-rated films and TV with a younger age rating. That meant your child could see “Finding Nemo,” but not the slightly more adult(?) “Finding Dory,” which is rated PG.
Today, families logging onto the service are discovering that almost all films have disappeared from the kids profiles. What’s going on and how can you fix it?
Ad-Supported Fallout
Today, Disney+ launched its first-ever ad-supported tier. It costs $7.99/month, while the ad-free tier now costs $10.99. Disney knows that including ads on content targeting younger consumers would be a bad look, so any profiles set to “Junior Mode” won’t see ads at all.
But there’s a catch.
Disney is not including most of its content on that “Junior Mode.” Even innocuous films like “Cinderella” and “A Bug’s Life” (both G-rated) are not available.
Strangely, the Junior Mode does allow viewing of a small handful of animated films like “Frozen II” and “The Emperor’s New Groove.” But you won’t find “Toy Story” or the first “Frozen” movie or… well… most of the stuff you signed up to watch.
How to Restore the Disney Library
To get all these movies back, you’ll need to change your child’s profile out of Junior Mode.
Select Edit Profiles, then choose your child’s profile and slide the Junior Mode toggle off.
You’ll need to enter your password to do this.
Once you do so, you can select the Content Rating to assign to the profile. Your choices are:
- TV-Y
- TV-Y7
- TV-Y7-FV
- G, TV-G
- PG, TV-PG
- PG-13
- TV-14
- R
- TV-MA
If you look at the description of each rating, you’ll see that the first three have some fine print: “Limited movies available with this rating.”
Just choose G, TV-G if you’d like to restore your child’s profile the way it was. Or choose PG, TV-PG if you think they can handle whatever reason “Finding Dory” got slapped with the higher rating.
However, if you do this, be aware that you will see ads on G-rated films if you have the ad-supported tier. Since most of the Disney+ library is inherently kid-friendly, they just want to prevent folks from avoiding ads with the “hack” of having a child’s profile.
It’s possible Disney+ will rotate the G-rated films available on the ad-supported plans that use a Junior Mode profile, but this should clear up any headaches you encounter when your kids demand to watch “The Little Mermaid” and you can’t find her today when you know she was there yesterday.
Disney+
Disney+ is a video streaming service with over 13,000 series and films from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, The Muppets, and more. It is available in 61 countries and 21 languages. It is notable for its popular original series like “The Mandalorian,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Loki,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” and “Andor.”