Over the past few weeks, Warner Bros. Entertainment has been uploading a selection of full movies to a playlist on YouTube. This is a strange move, given that the parent company Warner Bros. Discovery also owns the increasingly expensive Max streaming service. But free is free, so the company can be as weird as it wants!
It’s easy to assume that this is where the studio put its less prestigious back catalog to see if it could generate some advertising revenue from an unexpected source. There are some spectacularly awful things on the playlist, including a 1988 Bobcat Goldthwait car that received a rare 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
But it’s not just a digital dumping ground for bad movies. Quality films like Waiting for Huffman (from the hilarious Christopher Guest), The Science of Sleep (directed by Michel Gondry), and The Mission (starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons) are now fully available in a playlist on YouTube.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why Warner Bros. chose this path, or how the company selects films for release. Perhaps it is a response to business debts. Maybe it’s a licensing issue. Whatever the reason, the TL;DR is that you can watch exciting movies for free, and new titles are added every week.
