Q: purchased movies not on apple TV

Yes.

it is on my mac, which is where I can see everything, and on my iPad. But not on my apple TV.

No parental controls set on apple TV (probably should change that...)

Movies show up in My Movies, but not not in Purchased. the missing movies do show as purchased when I look in the my account history. Only the most recent purchase appears on all devices.

Tried signing out and signing back in. No dice.

Don't think so: all movies show as HD, protected mpeg 4 files. Since I purchased the older movies some time ago, is it that perhaps they pre-date apple TV?

No, just trying to figure out why these purchases are being treated differently. Guess I'll have to question Apple directly.

Nope, nothing's hidden.

It seems that these movies were mysteriously refunded shortly after they were purchased. The result is they still appear on my Mac, and I can download them to another device or pipe the playback to the apple TV, but can't download them from the cloud. Odd, but unless it becomes annoying I'm not going to change things. Possible unscrupulous mischief makers could take advantage of this loophole, though...