Beyond YouTube: 12 other free movie sites you should know
Platforms like Kanopy, Crackle, and Popcornflix offer a wide range of free films, from blockbusters to genre films to documentaries
Film Features Richard
Photo: gorodenkoff
Sure, there are plenty of great free movies on YouTube—but while YouTube is awesome, it’s not the only game in town. So we decided to put together a list of other sites that also offer free movies, break down the pros and cons of each one, briefly explore what they offer beyond movies, and then dive deep into the specific films that you can check out gratis (pretty much in all cases with ads). Here are 12 free streaming services where you can find some great films.
34 Comments
The best part about most of these is that you can find RiffTrax on them. If you want to recreate the experience of watching USA’s Up All Night, Tubi is the way to go!
Pluto has a Jeopardy channel, so it’s my favorite. Lot’s of good stuff on there.
I gave Pluto a try last year as I wanted to watch a show that was only on there (Franklin & Bash – never had seen it but liked the cast). I appreciate that it’s free but man, the ads are obnoxious. They don’t even bother to place the ads in the natural ad breaks that the show originally had, a lot of times they start in the middle of a character’s line.Hopefully Jeopardy has more natural ads than that.
Your local library might have additional video streaming options that will be available at no additional cost with your library card. Hoopla lets you check out 8 titles per month (across books, movies, and audiobooks), and they have a pretty healthy selection of older Hollywood movies (along with the usual b-movie filler). You can get the app for your TV or streaming device.
Came here for the Hoopla erasure. My old library actually lets you get 15 titles per month from them, plus there’s those months with bonus borrows. Used to get 15 a month from Kanopy too until they switched over to the new tickets system. Still works out to be around 15 though.
I loved Hoopla for the brief time my local library had it available, though it was only 3 titles/month at the time – there’s all sorts of flotsam for viewing on other free sites, but Hoopla seemed to have the most interesting flotsam.
I guess the number of checkouts depends on what your library’s subscription is. Hoopla has been great for books, music, and comics for awhile now. I remember when I first tried out their movies 10 or so years ago the offerings were pretty subpar, but they’ve really strengthened their catalog lately. I’m always thankful to check them before paying money to rent old films from a streaming site- I’ve saved more than a few bucks that way.
And audiobooks — Hoopla has all the Patrick O’brian Aubrey-Maturin books (narrated by the late Patrick Tull), the Alan Furst WWII spy novels (mostly narrated by George Guidall), and most of the John le Carre spy novels (narrated by various people, including the late le Carre in some of them)
Hoopla doesn’t set the number of checkouts/month – your local library does, and they pay per checkout. I get 26 cents every time someone checks out one of my books! It’s a goldmine, I tell you!
If your library is allowing 15/month, your library must be loaded! Mine has reduced it to to 2 and will be ending the service in June.
the irony of an author on this network of sites complaining about ads
Crackle hasn’t been owned by Sony in a few years. It is now owned, and I’m not kidding, by The Chicken Soup for the Soul company. They also own Redbox as well.
That’s easily the best thing I’m going to learn this week.
is Supermansion still on it? its the only thing that I’ve ever heard of on Crackle and it was really good.
Nope. It ended a while ago and is only available to buy and not stream anywhere.
Damn , that was a fantastic show , with a really amazing cast , Bryan Cranston , Michael Keegan Key , Heidi Gardner, Jillian Bell , and Chris Pine (who really kicks it out of the park as a voice actor on it ) .But a/ it looks like a Robot Chicken skit (which is fair as its the same team) and b/ was on a streaming service most people hadn’t heard of, so always overlooked , although they got three seasons and a few specials .(Also by its third season it had actually leaned into having a proper storyline rather just being a comedy show about a superhero team with a member called Jewbot ).
Here’s another pro-tip for you all:Hook a a mini-pc to your TV and watch these ad-supported sites through a browser with an ad-blocker on it. It will remove the ads for most of the on demand content. There are a couple of caveats in that these services will top out at around 720P on a PC, but most of these don’t have much content in higher resolution anyway. It also won’t get rid of ads in those “live” channels since those are baked into the streams themselves. If you’re using a PC, you can also watch content on those less than legal streaming sites.
I’m digging Plex these days. I love that their Search shows you where the movie/show you’re looking for IS playing, even if not on Plex. I don’t know of any other streamer (certainly not the Big Boys) that will point you directly to a competitor’s site. Very handy feature, plus they have a kajillion shows!
The only thing I’ve found wrong with Plex is with my local-storage movie-rips collection – it understands that both files of, for example, the two-disc Fellowship Of The Ring are one combined movie, but it doesn’t understand that the length of the movie is the total length of both files, so I can’t navigate to the second half. But that is literally the only problem I have with it. Aside from that, it may be the best money I ever spent on a lifetime licence. It even lets me stream from my NAS box at home to my phone out in the world. I’m my own Netflix!
I have PLEX a well, but use it much more for streaming my own music. I can watch a movie only so many times, but good music never gets old.
Use Handbrake or something to join the two parts into one. It literally takes less time than it did for you to write the above post (well, aside from waiting for the program to do its work).
I have Handbrake, but never knew it could do that. Thanks, I’ll check it out.
Handbrake can’t do it, it turns out.
https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/introduction/about.html At least they’re upfront about it, I guess. The search goes on…
Midnight Pulp is a subscriber service, but it has plenty of free movies, and has its own channel. Plenty of the free movies are available everywhere else, but there some good finds also. If you mess around on the search engine Yandex, the Russian social media site vk has its share of dodgy free movies.
I only recently discovered Tubi and their huge back catalog of adult-animated schlock.
And every single movie has one theme: “Fuck Millennials!”
Is there a movie called “Millennial Hunter” and does it have avocado toast on the poster? You bet yer sweet bippy.
Fucking hell, Bill Granger’s corpse is barely cold.
Freevee also has the original Japanese Iron Chef which is a great go-to when I’ve got 45 minutes to spare before bed. Fukui-san?
Kanopy is fucking great. Took me about five minutes to sign up for a free library card and activate my account and been using it ever since. Loads of foreign and older films on there, and loads of great documentaries. Hard to believe it’s free, honestly.
Kanopy is fucking awesome, especially for foreign stuff, documentaries, etc, but they also have mainstream movies on there too. They did something weird with their system recently, pivoting from 5 free views a month to some kind of ticket system I frankly don’t fully understand. But it’s 1) free and 2) ad free, so I’m not going to complain too much.Last thing I watched on there was Dark Star, John Carpenter’s first film from back in his student days. Not sure where else I could find something like that.
Roku also has a lot of GBBO content including the first 2 seasons we had never gotten to see in the US. They have all the past the UK celebrity versions a couple random related series (Paul Hollywood’s Pies and Puds, LOL) as well.
Ok.ru is a bit like a Russian YouTube. Lots of movies, TV shows, music videos from all over the world are posted. A lot of junk is on there, but also lots of good stuff, often obscure films with English subtitles. And newer stuff, some not even streaming yet, and obviously bootlegged. I just found All of Us Strangers on there.Now, there are ethical issues involved, of course, and I sometimes worry that Vladimir Putin is monitoring my viewing, but it is there, and you can look at it and decide if you want to partake.
I use Vudu a LOT, but not for its free section, which is 99% Shit Cinema. But Tubi is the go-to now (over Prime) for free films. Their selection is wildly satisfying, from blockbusters to micro-indies to foreign films to genre trash (the good kind). And they seem to add titles more frequently than most.
The perfect article to state yet again: JustWatch dot com is the best site to search where the film you’re wanting to watch is streaming or rentable. I find out That Film From Decades Ago I Just Remembered is playing on Tubi or Crackle, and have a good laugh because the AWOL films always end up on the free sites eventually.Example: Tubi is the only site to have The Music of Chance, which has no DVD or Blu-ray anywhere…these are the finds that make me happy.
The Roku channel had Panhandle , which was a comedy/crime show that was really really great , and completely ignored by the entire universe as it was on a streaming service that no one really uses .(although it looks like it was bought by another one that I’ve never heard of since then)
This article is garbage. Unresearched. Twice I looked up movies the guy referenced directly in his slideshow on “free movie channels” and each time they required a paid subscription. Farewell, AV Club. I remember when you soared above all the rest. Now you’ve lazied and cost-saved your way into this garbagiola.