In recent years, we’ve complained a lot about Warner Bros. Discovery, in part because their decision-making has seemed almost toxic and damaging to the creative community. A movie studio that literally makes movies and doesn’t release them? That seems like a bizarre state of affairs, and under David Zaslav, they’ve done it multiple times.
But the studio has recently done something that I’m really just kind of in awe about. Over the last month, across five different YouTube channels, the studio has released more than 30 full movies. On YouTube. For free. Without any sort of gating.
Much of the collection is here, but it doesn’t appear to even be a complete accounting of what the studio has released on the service. They keep adding movies, too. In the three or four days since I first spotted it, they’ve added at least two or three additional films.
And to be clear, this is not the YouTube Movies service, which is fully licensed and mainly represents a pretty good add-on perk of YouTube Premium subscriptions. Instead, WBD (without notice or promotion) is dropping full-on films that it spent millions of dollars making on its own channels, in a way that makes it feels like it’s saying that the films are commercially spent.
It is embracing a service where a popular type of video is basically watching someone else’s video and commenting on top of it. In some cases, it is likely that those reaction videos will get more views than these movies.
In terms of the quality, most of the films are kind of in the realm where nostalgia hasn’t caught up with them. Some of them are quite good—most notably Waiting for Guffman, Michael Collins, and Crossing Delancey. And some have sheer cult appeal—the 1986 Talking Heads film True Stories feels like a surprising choice to show up here, given that David Byrne is still firmly in the mainstream nearly 40 years after the film’s release.
But there are a lot of stinkers and obscurities. One such film on the list: The 11th Hour, an environmental documentary that was created by Leonardo DiCaprio in 2007 but was ultimately overshadowed by the similar An Inconvenient Truth, released a year prior. The 2008 film Chaos Theory, starring Ryan Reynolds, shows the film star at the nadir of his commercial power. And then there’s the infamous 2000 New Line Cinema release Dungeons & Dragons, which was basically forgotten by all but the die-hards before it showed up on this list.
(It is probably a matter of minutes until Town & Country, another infamous flop distributed by New Line during the same period, appears in this playlist.)
At least one film on the list was a bonafide hit upon its initial release—1977’s George Burns comedy Oh, God!, which had a $51 million box office run, equivalent to nearly $265 million in 2024 money. But most of the films on this list are more like The Adventures Of Pluto Nash, an infamous 2002 Eddie Murphy dud that came during a period in which Murphy was largely working on poorly reviewed family fare. (If not for Shrek, that entire period would have been a critical bust for Murphy. However, only the adult-oriented Pluto Nash lost money.)
Want a byte-sized version of Hacker News? Try TLDR’s free daily newsletter.
TLDR covers the most interesting tech, science, and coding news in just 5 minutes.
No sports, politics, or weather.
But what stands out more than anything else is that Warner Bros. released them this way, rather than in a format that limits access—something that Warner could easily do, thanks to the fact that it owns the streaming service Max, as well as Turner Classic Movies, a television channel that allows cable customers to stream. (The aforementioned Oh, God! appears on TCM’s website.)
So, what’s going on here? If I was going to speculate, my guess is that Warner has kind of put itself in this awkward place where it has failed to give a home to some of its less-heralded content on streaming services. And in some cases, it kind of feels like a shame. Example: The Science of Sleep, a 2006 Michel Gondry film that received good reviews and made a small profit at the box office, but simply didn’t reach the critical heights of Gondry’s prior release, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s not that this is a bad film—it seems to be, more than anything else, that it is kind of a forgotten one, poorly presented by the studio that paid millions of dollars to make and distribute it.
And honestly, in a lot of ways, that shows why this decision seems so bewildering. By releasing a handful of hidden gems next to some of the worst films it ever released, WBD is doing a disservice to its creative teams of past and present. It is essentially telling its catalog artists that it may simply drop an old film on a service that most people don’t even think of as a streamer.
Warner Bros. is not lacking for proper channels to release this content in full. So why post on YouTube in an DRM-free, region-free way? (For sake of confirming the films didn’t have DRM, I opened up yt-dlp frontend Parabolic and had it download two films currently on YouTube: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is on YouTube Movies, and Dungeons & Dragons, which isn’t. The former was blocked from working; the latter downloaded and played easily in VLC.) The message seems to be, “nobody wants this stuff,” which is a weird thing for an entertainment conglomerate to say about its own archives. Even if these films make money through ad revenue, it likely won’t add up to much in residuals compared to a distribution deal.
After all, if you can just watch these films for free here, why would you buy these from Amazon or somewhere else? Well, presumably you could get the films in better quality on Blu-ray. And they might come with commentary tracks, in case you want to hear about the decisions that led to Pluto Nash being made. But there likely aren’t a lot of die-hard fans of most of these movies; they probably don’t need more than the videos themselves.
(And it turns out that as major studios go, WBD isn’t alone. As spotted by film podcaster Matthew Buck of Film Brain after we published, Sony is also doing similar things on their clips channels, though the selection is somewhat less loaded with poorly reviewed junk, and instead leans more on obscurity.)
For years, the line we heard from movie studios was that these movies needed to be protected with strict digital rights management to prevent them from appearing in the wrong hands. This works against that.
But at the same time, it’s perhaps the way things are going. As I noted in my recent piece on Ernie Kovacs, YouTube is increasingly seen as the best option for releasing content made before the 1980s, as Netflix and other services seem to be favoring more recent works. Perhaps this signifies that it’s an issue for even the big studios.
All that said: I’m not exactly sure what message WBD is sending here by offloading these seemingly random movies in such a bewildering way. But maybe it’s a sign that, once the long tail starts thinning out, the streaming revolution isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Anyway, Waiting for Guffman still holds up, and you can watch it on YouTube, for free.
Bargain-Bin Links
It might have been easy to miss amid all the chaos of the week, but there’s a NSFW porn app on the iOS App Store in Europe, thanks to the European Union’s alternative app store rules. Apple’s very much not happy about it, but they don’t have a say.
Mark Zuckerberg has alienated Jesse Eisenberg. For those hoping for a sequel to The Social Network, we may not be getting it.
We lost a great one this week. Don Hui, a YouTuber whose channel Novaspirit Tech highlighted a broad passion for homelabbing and the less-talked-about corners of tech, passed away after a yearlong battle with cancer. Jeff Geerling, a friend of Tedium, announced the news on his channel with a tribute. Loved his stuff, he probably got me passionate about Docker. Above is one of my favorite videos of his—a clip of him installing Windows 11 on a OnePlus 6.
--
Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! And don’t be afraid to give a forgotten old movie a chance, even if it’s an infamous flop.
Edit: WBD isn’t alone. This piece has been updated to highlight Sony’s more-under-the-radar efforts to give their obscure films a second life.
