In the good news/bad news category, this one is a real heartbreaker. Good news, according to Variety: legendary anime Studio Ghibli movies, long elusive to the streaming video watcher, will soon be available on Netflix. Bad news: That doesn’t apply if you live in the U.S., Canada, or Japan. Variety says that the combo of Netflix, sales agent Wild Bunch, and Studio Ghibli “will upload 21 Ghibli features including Academy Award-winner Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Arrietty, Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, and The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya” onto the streaming service.
In a prepared statement, producer Toshio Suzuki at Studio Ghibli said, “We’ve listened to our fans and have made the definitive decision to stream our film catalogue. We hope people around the world will discover the world of Studio Ghibli through this experience.” Except for people in those three other countries apparently, maybe because they are possibly already familiar with the studio?
Fear not, die-hard fans of Kiki, Arrietty, and Princess Mononoke: As previously announced, your favorite Studio Ghibli titles are still headed to HBO Max. HBO Max promises “the entire Studio Ghibli film library,” and its launch is set for May 2020. However, this is not as great as the Netflix deal, as HBO Max will cost $14.99 a month. Man, this good news/bad news whiplash is exhausting.
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So, parents: HBO Max or Disney+?
HBO Max will have new Adventure Time!
Oooo, don’t know how I feel about that…
Jeremy Shada is an old man. He’s at least 40. I don’t think he should do it anymore.
No, I’m axing this idea.
It’s gone.
What?
Yeah. New Adventure Time coming this year.
WHAAAT?! That’s totally math, man.
I know. I’m very excited. 4 hour long specials. One devoted to PB and Marceline, one focused on BMO, one focusing on Peppermint Butler and Wizard City, and the final one devoted to Finn and Jake.
Disney+ and Netflix (+ Prime Video but it’s just a sideline of my prime account …). The rest is on Plex … Ghibli included.
Disney+ will have all that Disney goodness, but HBO Max will have all of the Cartoon Network shows, and I believe DC shows as well.
The HBO CEO of Dongs is much more powerful than the Disney CEO of Dongs. Points to HBO.
My 4-year-old doesn’t watch anything on Disney+ except for Mater shorts (which means we have to change the video every 5 minutes). He’s too young for Star Wars or the MCU. Those Mickey Mouse shorts are cute but he’s frightened by them, and his childhood is richer for not having to sit through Snow White or Peter Pan (Beauty and the Beast is a different story, but we own a copy of that). And I work in a children’s hospital, so I got sick of Frozen before the little dude was born. He’d probably like Lady and the Tramp, so maybe that’ll end up in the rotation sometime? Oh, and he watches Cars 3 occasionally. I think it would cost about $20 for us to replace Disney+ with some DVDs. So I guess HBO Max by default? Ghibli movies can be expensive to buy, and even their less beloved movies are a step up from the bottom of the Disney barrel. Really, the stuff my kid likes most is on Netflix. EDIT – One thing Disney+ has going for it is a big collection of Fox/Marvel superhero cartoons. I definitely have nostalgia-goggles for those things, but I’d rather watch them with a small child than the MCU.
Unless you’re in North America**
( Which includes multiple other countries apart from just United States)
Now we can watch Tales From Earthsea and When Marnie Was There whenever we like….
Don’t forget The Cat Returns!
Hey, I LIKE The Cat Returns!
To be fair, I’ve never seen it, I just like that it exists. Actually Whisper of the Heart sounds interesting, so maybe that’ll be a reason to get HBO Max. Although I currently have a stack of Ghibli movies that my son is either too young to watch (Princess Mononoke, Pom Poko) or just doesn’t want to watch (Ponyo, Secret World of Arietty), so I’m just lying to myself. There was a brief stretch where he wanted to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service all the time, which was great. And the other week he wanted to watch Spirited Away twice, which was also great. Now we’re back to Mater shorts and the Netflix show about Colorforms(R).
Too young for Pom Poko? But the hilarious testicles!!
I wish Cinemax would start a streaming service, if only to have them name it Cinemax Max. Which, of course, would be the name of their terrible animated animal mascot that we’d all get sick of in like two days. We’d all hit our max on Cinemax Max in two days, max.I think I’m having a stroke.
A few years ago I got a free month of Cinemax’s streaming site, and I was genuinely amazed by how much I didn’t want to watch anything on there. There’s usually some random-ass movie that I’d been meaning to see, but it was just a desert of bad comedies. It was wild.
I got Starz for free with my Spotify account a while back, and it was the same situation. Nothing I either hadn’t seen or didn’t really care enough about seeing to actually sit down and watch it.
I think I used a free trial of Starz to watch some Friday the 13th movies. They also had Spider-Man: Homecoming, but it left the service before I could watch it so I rented it from the Red Box. But yeah, I don’t have much interest in watching a new Evil Dead series, I already own both seasons of Party Down, and they had some interesting movies on streaming, but if I’m honest I’m just not going to watch a classic Western. The current state of streaming just makes me miss video stores. I got it in my head to watch the fourth Hellraiser movie this weekend, but the only option is to spend $4 renting it on Amazon. If there was ever a movie that screams “don’t pay extra to watch me,” it’s the fourth Hellraiser.
Straight up, the free Roku Channel app and Tubi have better content than Starz. I just watched ‘Hype!’, the killer and hilarious documentary about grunge-era Seattle in the early ‘90s. I literally could not find it anywhere but there.
Cinemax Max’s Max
“Studio Ghibli is coming to Netflix… unless you’re in the United States”No shit. HBO Max announced their deal for the US streaming rights THREE FUCKING MONTHS AGO. Did you think they were going to come to Netflix too?
People will bitch whenever anything comes to anything other than Netflix or Hulu.
VPNs are a lot less than 15/mo
*laughs in VPN*
(Checks shelf for Studio Ghibli DVDs.)Yep, still there.
Should Australia not burn to the ground before these titles come to Netflix, I’ll enjoy this a lot.