A Plea for More Classic Films on Streaming Services (An Ode to Tubi)
The silent victor of the streaming wars
As I am writing this article, nearly every major film studio has its own respective streaming service. Paramount has Paramount+, Warner Brothers has HBO Max, Fox/Disney has Hulu and Disney+, and Universal has Peacock. The only hold-out is Sony Pictures who have instead chosen to release their films on Netflix starting next year. All these extra services also unfortunately come at a cost as well. If one wishes to purchase every major service they would be spending upwards of $67 a month (this number is factoring base price for each major studio streaming service as well as Netflix and Amazon).
Despite the jarring cost, many of these services lack quite a good selection of older films. In fact, according to this graph by Ampere Analysis, most streaming services have much more films from the 2010s compared to anything else. With Netflix having a whopping eighty-one percent of their films being released in that time period. When it comes to older films released before 1970, the clear advantage goes to HBO Max, considering WarnerMedia owns Turner Classic Movies as well as most of MGM and RKO’s film libraries. While including more niche streaming services regarding cinema, the obvious victor is the Criterion Channel, with its extensive and professionally curated selection of old studio pictures, art-house hits, and supplemental interviews. However, the counterfactual that should be addressed is: what if you still wished to receive an education of the formative cinema classics but did not want to pay a single penny to do so?
That is where Tubi comes in, with its evergreen subscription price of zero cents a month, it easily outperforms the competition (the sole catch is the minimal ads that sometimes don’t even show up throughout watching an entire feature film). The selection of films on Tubi is entirely idiosyncratic. Just by me scrolling through the website’s home page things advertised are movies from the Divergent series (remember those?), the 1994 Rick Moranis vehicle Little Giants, and Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider. Tubi boasts the largest selection of titles compared to any other service, I haven’t been able to find a precise number but it’s somewhere between 20,000 to 50,000. Now a lot of these movies are low-budget films like Suburban Sasquach that are insultingly flimsy in their filmmaking techniques. But the lowest of lows in the selection are easily made up for with the highest of highs. I could comfortably say that not only do I find the selection of films by important directors not only be fantastic on Tubi but also substantially better than what Netflix has to offer. Take the films of John Ford for example. Ford is one of the most revered directors in the history of cinema, his mythologizing of America and filmmaking techniques that inspired Orson Welles upon many others are formative films for any burgeoning filmmaker or cineaste to watch. Ford’s reinvigoration of the western genre with Stagecoach (1939) is among one of his most important yet, Stagecoach and none of Ford’s other films for that matter are on Netflix. But on Tubi, the latter is available on top of another Ford film from the same year starring Peter Fonda, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Similarly, German director Werner Herzog is another important inclusion in the at-large cinematic canon of filmmaking that has barely any representation on Netflix. At least Herzog has films on the service (the 2016 volcano documentary Into the Inferno and a PSA against texting while driving titled From One Second to the Next) but this is nothing compared to what Tubi has to freely offer from the New German Cinema director. On Tubi, close to every narrative film Herzog has made is offered. Herzog’s triptych on settler colonialism Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Fitzcarrado (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987) are all freely available to watch. Unfortunately, the curation on Tubi is not entirely there, but it pretty much follows the framework of pretty much every other service (save for HBO Max and The Criterion Channel) where it is just a bunch of things dumped somewhere that you scroll through aimlessly, just with a better selection.
As Netflix will continue to dominate the streaming wars it is important to remember how people find what they wish to watch. I remember when One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) were put on Netflix and swaths of people experienced these classic films that at that point had never seen it. Netflix is still a kingmaker concerning getting eyes on screens and I personally find it insulting that not a single Howard Hawks film is not available to watch on their service (His Girl Friday (1940) is literally in the public domain!). The populous at large should be able to appreciate these films and the best way to do that is to have them on the most popular platform. For now, however, the best place to watch the golden-age classics is Tubi, the website where Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and the Wayans Brother’s Little Man (2004) could potentially show up next to each other which is kind of beautiful in a way. ◒
Best films currently streaming on Tubi (as of June 22nd, 2021)