In recent years, he has complained about many things about Warner Bros Discovery. Part of that was because their decisions were mostly toxic and seemed to be damaging to their creative community. A film studio that literally makes movies and doesn’t release them? It seems like a strange situation, and under David Zaslav, they did it many times.
But the studio has recently done something I really admire. Last month, the studio released over 30 full movies on five different YouTube channels. On YouTube. Free. There is no gating of any kind.
Much of the collection is here, but it doesn’t seem to be even full accounting, although the studio released it on service. They continue to add movies too. Three or four days after I first found them, they added at least two or three movies.
To be clear, this is not a YouTube movie service. This is fully licensed and represents a pretty good add-on perk primarily for YouTube Premium subscriptions. Instead, WBD (no notifications or promotions) has removed full-on movies that have spent millions of dollars on their own channels, making it seem like they are saying that the film is being spent commercially. Masu.
Popular types of videos are basically accepting services where they watch someone else’s video and comment on it. In some cases, these reaction videos may get more views than these movies.
When it comes to quality, most films are in an area where nostalgia hasn’t kept up to them. Some of them are very good. In particular, we are waiting for Guffman, Michael Collins and Crossing Delancey. And there is some cult charm. The true story of Talking Heads in 1986 feels like an incredible choice to come up here, given that David Byrne is still in the mainstream almost forty years after the film’s release.
However, there is a lot of foul odors and obscurity. One such film on the list: the 11th hour, a similarly inconvenient truth-covered environmental documentary created by Leonardo DiCaprio in 2007, but ultimately released a year ago. The 2008 film Chaos Theory starring Ryan Reynolds shows the lowest-ranked film star of his commercial power. And then there’s the infamous 2000 new Line Cinema Release Dungeon & Dragons.
(Perhaps a few minutes to the towns and countries where another infamous flop distributed on the new line during the same period will appear in this playlist.)
At least one film on the list was a genuine hit with its first release. God, George Burns comedy from 1977! . This was at a box office revenue of $51 million, equivalent to $265 million in 2024. However, most of the films on this list resemble the adventures of Pluto Nash, the infamous Eddie Murphy Dad in 2002, who came during a period when Murphy was working on unreviewed family fares. (If it wasn’t Shrek, that whole period would have been an important bust for Murphy. However, only the adult ut tune Nash lost the money.)
But what stands out more than anything is that Warner Bros. released it like this, rather than a form of restricting access. There are things Warner can do easily thanks to the fact that they own streaming services Max and Turner. Classic movies are television channels that allow cable customers to stream. (Aaaah, God! Appears on the TCM website as mentioned above.)
So, what’s going on here? If I’m going to guess, my guess is that Warner put himself in this nasty place where he couldn’t give a home to some of the less-than-meaning content about streaming services. And in some cases, it feels like a kind of shame. Example: The Science of Sleep was a 2006 Michel Gondry film that earned a small profit at the box office, but did not reach the critical heights of Gondry’s previous release, Spotless Mind’s Eternal Sunshine . This is not to say that this is a bad movie. Above all, it’s a forgotten film, and it seems like the studio has paid millions of dollars to make and distribute it.
And honestly, in many ways, that shows why this decision seems so baffling. WBD is harming creative teams past and present by releasing a handful of hidden gems next to some of the worst movies ever released. Essentially, I tell catalog artists that they simply drop old movies on services that most people don’t consider to be streamers.
Warner Bros. doesn’t lack the right channel to release this content in full. So why do you post to YouTube in a DRM-free, locally-free way? (To make sure there is no DRM in the movie, I opened YT-DLP Frontend Parabolic and currently downloaded two movies to YouTube. The former blocked it from working. These movies Even if you make money through advertising revenue, you won’t be much more residual than in circulation.
After all, if you can watch these movies for free here, why would you buy them on Amazon or somewhere? Well, you’ll probably get a better quality movie on Blu-ray. And they may have commentary tracks in case you want to hear about the decision that Pltune’s Nash was made. However, most of these films don’t have many stubborn fans. They probably don’t need more than the video itself.
(And as the major studios progressed, it turns out that WBD isn’t alone. After film podcaster Matthew Buck announced to film Brain’s Matthew Buck, Sony has done something similar on the Clips channel. But the choice load is a bit less reviewed junk, instead leaning towards ambiguous.)
For years, the line I heard from film studios was that these films need to be protected with strict digital rights controls to prevent them from appearing in the wrong hands. This works for that.
But at the same time, it’s probably the way things are going. As mentioned in a recent article on Ernie Kovacs, YouTube is the best way to release content created before the 1980s, as Netflix and other services appear to support more recent titles. It is considered an option. Perhaps this means that it’s a problem even for big studios.
That being said, offloading these seemingly random films in such a confusing way means we don’t know exactly what messages WBD is sending here. But that may be a sign that the streaming revolution is not cracking as the long tail begins to thin.
Anyway, waiting for Guffman is still ongoing and can be viewed for free on YouTube.
Bargain Bin Link
It may have been easy to miss amid all the chaos this week, but thanks to the European Union’s alternative app store rules, there is an NSFW porn app in the iOS app store in Europe. Apple isn’t too happy about it, but they have no say.
Mark Zuckerberg alienated Jesse Eisenberg. For those who want a sequel to a social network, we may not have gotten it.
I lost something amazing this week. YouTuber Don Hui, whose Novaspirit Tech’s channel emphasizes a broader passion on the corner of home loving and technology, passed away after a year’s battle with cancer. Tedium’s friend Jeff Geerling has paid tribute to the news on his channel. I loved his stuff and he probably gave me a passion for Docker. The above is one of my favorite videos. This is a clip where he installs Windows 11 on OnePlus 6.
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Would you like to make this an interesting read? Share it with your friends! And don’t be afraid to give a chance to an old forgotten film, even if it’s an infamous flop.
Edit: WBD is not alone. This film was updated to highlight Sony’s more efforts to give their obscure film a second life.
