Were you counting on spending a weekend on the couch working your way through your Netflix streaming queue? Don't plan on watching any Sony movies. They've been due a disagreement between Sony and Starz.
"You may have noticed that Sony movies through StarzPlay are not currently available to watch instantly," Netflix's vice president of content acquisition Pauline Fischer wrote in a blog post. "This is the result of a temporary contract issue between Sony and Starz, and while these two valued partners work through their differences, we hope you are enjoying the wide variety of new movies and TV shows added daily. In the next few weeks, look for great movie titles like 'The Fighter,' 'Skyline,' and 'Iron Man 2,' as well as the first four seasons of 'Mad Men,' all added to watch instantly."
Hopefully you're not in the middle of movies like "The Social Network," "Salt," and "Easy A"; They've been yanked for the time being.
The specifics of both the disagreement as well as the contract are unclear, but Deadline.com notes that the contract between Sony and Starz puts a cap on the number of times a certain title movies offered through StarzPlay can be watched online every month. It's possible that this limit has been exceeded and Starz will have to cough up the cash to Sony in order to have have StarzPlay movies restored to Netflix.
Neither Starz nor Sony have commented on the issue and there's no word when the movies will be available again.