Warner Bros. is dumping free movies on YouTube — like the original Dungeons & Dragons

A new Variety report notes that Warner Bros. Entertainment has been dropping movies on YouTube for free streaming — 33 of them since Jan. 1, including the classic thriller Deathtrap, a few deeply random horror movies (Critters 4 and Return of the Living Dead Part II), the charming Michel Gondry dream-fantasy The Science of Sleep, and the misbegotten boondoggle Dungeons & Dragons. (No, not the one most of us liked, the 2000 movie where Jeremy Irons not only eats all the scenery, he gets two extra-action claw attacks per round on the scenery, too.) The movies are ad-supported, except for YouTube Premium subscribers. Looking for programmatic ad revenue and YouTube monetization feels like an oddly penny-ante way for a major studio to monetize its back catalog. But then, none of these movies are major releases. There are a handful of crowd-pleasers, like Christopher Guest’s improv comedy Waiting for Guffman or the Jackie Chan martial-arts comedy Mr. Nice Guy, which has registered 16 million views over the course of a month. And there are a few bona fide classics, like the 1962 Best Picture nominee Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando. But some of these movies are available on other free services like Tubi or Plex, and none are likely to be major draws on Max or on digital rental services. So it seems like dropping older and lower-demand movies on YouTube is effectively free money for parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, which has been in a phase of cost-cutting, layoffs, and corporate refocusing since 2022, when contentious exec David Zaslav took over as CEO of the restructured corporation. If YouTube monetization works out for Warner Bros., which seems to be quietly adding more new free movies to the service every few days, we can expect to see the roster grow. The free movies are spread out across various Warner Bros.-owned YouTube Channels, but there’s a master list of them here. Feel free to start with Dungeons & Dragons, if you haven’t already seen it. It’s a ridiculous botch of the game concept from start to finish, with Justin Whalin and Marlon Wayans as a pair of thieves lured into a scheme to topple an evil, shouty dictator (Jeremy Irons), and the overall sense that no one involved with the movie ever played the TTRPG or even knew it was one. But if you enjoy a bad-movie night and “free” seems like a reasonable price point, Warner Bros. just gave you another way to tune in.