UPDATE: Crave PR sent the following comment on Monday morning: “Due to a scheduling change, ‘299 Queen Street West’ no longer premiered on Crave on Friday Jan. 26. This was a last minute update.”
Every GenXer that was eagerly awaiting the MuchMusic doc 299 Queen Street West to start streaming on Crave this week found themselves left wondering where the heck it was when it failed to arrive on Friday as scheduled.
In our excitement over the doc we promoted it multiple times, including in our What’s streaming in Canada this week guide. So when we learned it was not actually on the service as planned on Friday, we did some digging.
Our first course of action was to contact our PR contacts at Crave asking for an answer. This was sent late Friday evening and we didn’t expect to hear back right away. Then we headed to social media to see if there were any announcements from the streaming service to indicate what happened.
This is where it gets weird.
It appears Crave are trying to remove all mention that 299 Queen Street West was going to be streaming on January 26. On X (formerly Twitter), the Crave account changed a pinned post that had promoted it. Their Instagram account still have a mention up as of this writing, as you can also see in the screenshot below.
Whoever is handling their social media accounts are also out in the cold about what happened it seems. Their Instagram account replied to a user on Friday saying “rest assured it will be uploaded tonight.” It wasn’t. As of Saturday afternoon there are responses to people asking about it that show the people answering are totally in the dark.
To double check we weren’t losing our minds we went back to the December press release that gives us the list of new titles coming to the service (and where we originally got the screenshot of the doc from above). To our surprise, all mentions of 299 Queen Street West have now been scrubbed from the press release online!
Our best guess as to what happened
Until we know for certain what happened, our best guess is that an ongoing legal dispute over the documentary with Universal Music Canada escalated in the days leading up to the premiere and Crave had to pull it. Why they wouldn’t announce this to subscribers or media is puzzling, even more so that it appears they are trying to pretend it was never supposed to stream or air.
We will update this post once we get a definitive answer as to what happened to 299 Queen Street West and when, if ever, you will be able to watch it on Crave. In the meantime, enjoy the trailer for the film below.
Were you expecting to watch 299 Queen Street West this week? Tell us in the comments below or on our Facebook page.
