YouTube has had free “movies” for years, most of them ripped from somebody’s DVD copy with a bizarrely cropped video and poorly synced audio (and they even used to be chopped up into 10-minute chunks), but lately the video site has been adding actual legal content that users can buy in order to make it more competitive with services like Amazon Prime. Now, YouTube has reached the next, inevitable stage of any non-Amazon/Netflix/Hulu streaming service: free movies!
Actually, the exclamation point there isn’t really warranted, as the majority of the free movies here aren’t, you know, good. But hey, a free movie is better than a movie you have to pay for (sometimes). The catch, other than some of the movies being bad, is that these free movies are ad-supported, so it’s just like watching an on-demand movie off of a cable box. Deadline notes that this comes after Roku added free, ad-supported movies on its Roku Channel and Walmart’s Vudu service got some free movies of its own. Also, while Deadline doesn’t know exactly how the monetization here works, YouTube says it will eventually be adding a way for advertisers to sponsor individual movies and offer special “screenings.”
But we’ve stalled long enough, and now it’s time to talk about the actual movies you can watch right now. You’ll actually have to go to this link to watch them, but what’s one extra click when it means you can watch Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London for free? Or how about Kevin James in Zookeeper? Or the first Agent Cody Banks? Or Legally Blonde, which is actually a good one? Or Rocky? Or Throw Momma From The Train? Or The Terminator? Or something called Mystery Road? Or a Western starring Josh Peck from Drake And Josh? Or a movie called The Great Buck Howard that has so many famous people in it that it must be good?