A new year always brings big licensing shakeups across streaming platforms. A lot of new titles arrive, but plenty of familiar favorites quietly disappear at the same time. One of the movies set to leave soon is the 2013 action thriller White House Down. Starting January 1, 2026, the film will no longer be available to stream on Netflix. That puts it on the growing list of early 2010s action movies that are slowly rotating out of major streaming libraries.
The film stars Channing Tatum as John Cale, an Afghanistan veteran and police officer who dreams of joining the Secret Service, but his application gets rejected. Not wanting to let down his little girl with the news, he takes her on a special tour of the White House. But that trip quickly goes off the rails when a heavily armed paramilitary group storms the building. Suddenly, Cale is doing the very job he was denied. He has to fight through the mercenaries while trying to protect his daughter and keep the President (Jamie Foxx) alive.
When White House Down first hit theaters, reactions were mixed from both critics and audiences. The film still holds a rotten 52% critic rating and a 62% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. A big reason for that reception was timing. It was released the same year as Olympus Has Fallen, which had a nearly identical premise. Both movies are basically Die Hard set inside the White House. Olympus Has Fallen has since turned into a full franchise with London Has Fallen in 2016, Angel Has Fallen in 2019, and even a TV series in 2024 titled Paris Has Fallen. But White House Down never even managed to get a sequel going. Still, for fans of the Has Fallen franchise, White House Down offers a lighter, less grim version of the same idea. It is an easy watch and worth revisiting before it leaves Netflix.
The Director of ‘White House Down’ Has Another High-Stakes Action Epic Coming
Roland Emmerich, the director behind White House Down, already has another large-scale action movie on the way. The upcoming film is titled Exodus, and it will be set in the not-so-distant future where climate disasters and violent militias have pushed society to the brink of collapse. Two kids armed with only a smartphone join forces with a rogue pilot and a defiant doctor, and together, they race across a war-torn landscape to uncover a global conspiracy. Emmerich’s Centropolis Entertainment is producing the film, and it will reportedly have a budget of $100-$110 million. It looks like another return to the kind of large, old-school, crowd-pleasing action Emmerich is known for.
White House Down is available to stream on Netflix till December 31, after which it will move to the MGM+ Amazon Channel.
- Release Date
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June 27, 2013
- Runtime
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131 minutes
- Director
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Roland Emmerich
- Writers
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James Vanderbilt