Over the past several weeks, Warner Bros. Entertainment has been uploading a selection of full movies to a playlist on YouTube. It’s an odd move, considering parent Warner Bros. Discovery also owns the increasingly pricey streaming service Max. But free is free, so the company can be odd as much as it wants!
It’d be easy to assume this is where the studio is putting its less prestigious back catalog, just to see if it can rake in some ad revenue from an unexpected source. And there is some impressively terrible stuff in the playlist, including a 1988 Bobcat Goldthwait vehicle that achieved the rare 0 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
But this isn’t just a digital dumping ground for bad movies. Quality films such as Waiting for Guffman (from the hilarious Christopher Guest), The Science of Sleep (directed by Michel Gondry) and The Mission (starring Robert DeNiro and Jeremy Irons) are all currently available in full on the YouTube playlist.
It’s tough to gauge exactly why Warner Bros. would be taking this route, or how the company is selecting movies to release. Maybe it’s a response to business debts. Maybe it’s a licensing issue. Whatever the reason, the TL;DR is that there are some fascinating movies you can stream for free, and new titles are being added every week.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/warner-bros-is-sharing-select-movies-for-free-on-youtube-230005326.html?src=rss