Whitney Houston recently passed away. Of course, to mourn her people are interested in her work again. They’re listening to songs and watching her old movies, like The Bodyguard.

There is a controversy brewing that Warner Bros. had Netflix pull The Bodyguard from their Instant Stream service to pump up DVD sales. Dan McDermott, a newspaper publish did some digging and found out from a Netflix customer rep the following:

Netflix rep: “Okay Dan, I just went and talked to my main supervisor as to why the movie had been pulled and the reason it was pulled was the production company pulled the streaming rights from us because all the publicity after Whitney Houston’s passing there was an opportunity to make really a very large amount of money on the DVD sales of her movies. So they’re going to pull all the streaming titles we have of Whitney Houston so they can make more money off the DVD sales of her movies.”

This, of course, is disgusting if true. I contacted Netflix to find out if this was true and Steve Swasey, VP of Corporate Communications, told me the film was pulled from Instant Stream last year, when the license from the film expired.

On February 11, Roger Ebert posted on his Facebook that The Bodyguard was streaming on Amazon for free. Now, normally when a celebrity dies Ebert posts a link to a film he likes from him/her. The vast majority of the time he posts a link to Netflix. Unless Warner Bros. conspired to do this in the hours after her death was announced or Ebert decided not to check one his favorite film services before he checked Amazon, there is no conspiracy here. If you were able to watch The Bodyguard on Netflix on February 10th or before, do let us know in the comments.

netflix, whitney houston