41 Warner Bros. Movies on YouTube — Free, The Way We Like It

From Tedium:

The New DVD Bargain Bin

A major studio is apparently treating YouTube as a place to drop some of its archive films that have lost their cinematic luster. My mind is admittedly blown.

Warner Bros. 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.

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.

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.

I'm not exactly sure what message is being sent 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.