Ever since the silent era, where many films have now been lost, preservation of the medium has been a challenge—one that seemed to ease with the rise of the home video market in the 70s and 80s. In recent years, however, physical media has largely given way to streaming, making older films more difficult to maintain and leaving others at risk of removal due to a perceived lack of demand. In an effort to combat this problem, Warner Brothers is now trying a unique experiment by releasing several older films on YouTube for free. Although the studio has rightly earned a reputation for abandoning projects and prioritizing streaming over live cinema, this is perhaps one thing they are doing right. It’s easy to conclude that the studio is doing the right thing for the wrong reason, but such an idea offers a rare glimmer of hope for how old films can be preserved outside of streaming. Time will tell whether this gamble will work, but it remains something that other studios should at least consider.
Preservation of Film Has Long Been a Difficult Issue

For perhaps eighty years of the past century that film has been commercially viable, preserving it has varied wildly from one form to another. In the silent era, the vast majority of films were lost to time, including multiple classics of the day, and it would take decades for older films to find a more permanent home. In 1989, the Library of Congress created the National Film Registry, but they mainly focus on the most famous films and induct a very small number of them each year. Methods of ownership also changed throughout the decades, as the popularity of VHS and later DVD allowed many viewers to keep physical copies of a film for the first time. Today, however, physical media has become almost extinct in favor of streaming and online services, which have become far more convenient. The flip side to this, of course, is that those films or shows can vanish at any time if the company operating the streaming service deems them a liability. This is by no means a hypothetical, as it has happened before with streaming, and it leaves piracy as the only option for viewers seeking to enjoy material that they love.
Warner Brothers Has Had a Mixed Track Record Around Preservation

Image via MGM

When it comes to preserving their own films, no movie studio has been more controversial than Warner Brothers in the past few years. Both before and after the disastrous AT&T merger, the company has infamously dumped their products on streaming and shelved unfinished films for tax write-offs. By prioritizing HBO Max during COVID over all else at the expense of a normal theatrical release, the studio effectively burned its bridges with even some of their most fervent allies, and the studio has never fully recovered the goodwill of many within the industry. That makes their latest move either an exercise in cynicism or even a genuine attempt to make amends, depending upon who you ask.

Related

Quentin Tarantino Is Really Worried About Movie Theaters, and You Know What? He Has a Point

“What the f*** is a movie now?”

Over the past month, Warner Brothers has been quietly placing older films in a hidden playlist on their official YouTube channel. The range of the movies in question varies wildly, from remakes of classics like Mutiny on the Bounty to franchise sequels such as Return of the Living Dead Part II that are forgotten today. Other films are more notorious, like the first Dungeons & Dragons film in 2005 or The Adventures of Pluto Nash, often called one of the worst films ever made. What they all have in common is that they each remain mostly obscure and would probably have fallen through the cracks if they had not been posted online for free.
This YouTube Model Could Be a Road Map for Other Studios

As refreshing as it might feel to see these films being preserved online, we also should not give Warner Brothers too much praise, either. After all, this is a studio whose reputation was so badly damaged that members of Congress were calling for investigations into their recent practices. Therefore, any good PR is badly needed, and their personal motivations could easily be dismissed as cynical, not altruistic. Regardless, it does open a window into other options studios can take to keep film alive.
For older and obscure films like these, where keeping them on streaming is literally more expensive than removing them, a unique method like this could allow them to remain accessible to an audience at large. Without it, those who might want to watch such works would have to resort to piracy, which itself can harm the film business. Of course, such a strategy might not apply everywhere, and there might be copyright laws to consider for films not yet in the public domain, but it also might be the best chance we have. Even five years ago, this might have seemed unthinkable, but if we want to prevent older films from becoming lost forever when they are no longer profitable, then studios might have to start creating unique methods to maintain them, and Warner Brothers might be off to a decent start.

The Adventures Of Pluto Nash

Release Date

August 16, 2002

Runtime

95 Minutes

Director

Ron Underwood

Writers

Neil Cuthbert