In my job as a writer about movies, the #1 question I ask myself almost daily is “Where is it streaming?”
(The #2 question is probably “Can I find a way to write about Gymakta today?”)
[The #3 question is probably “Where is Gymkata streaming?”]
More and more, I find that the answer to my first question is Tubi, the ad-supported streaming site owned by Fox. When it started in 2014, Tubi was mostly the home to a lot of random junk. Since Fox acquired Tubi in 2020, though, its library has gotten a lot bigger, and a lot better. There’s still a fair amount of oddities, but there’s also a surprising number of classics too, some dating back almost 100 years. When people ask me what streaming services they should be using now, Tubi has become one of my go-to answers — mostly because I find myself using it so much now.
I’m still not crazy about the sudden commercial breaks on the site — although my anecdotal experience lately is that the ads seem to be less frequent and less awkwardly inserted into the films than they were when I wrote this essay almost three years ago. The viewing experience still ish’t perfect; if a movie was streaming simultaneously on Tubi and some other site that doesn’t have ads, I would obviously pick the uninterrupted experience.
But I’m also a realist; subscription streaming sites are expensive, and most people can only afford to subscribe to one or two at a time. If the choice is between watching something on Tubi and not watching it, you should watch it on Tubi. Is it any worse than the way people used to watch movies on television for decades? No — and in fact it is clearly better, since at least Tubi’s prints of films are, for the most part, presented in their original aspect ratio and not pan-and-scanned.
To prove my point that Tubi’s library has really improved, here are 15 titles from across history and around the world all currently available there.
The Best Movies to Watch on Tubi Right Now
The ad-supported streaming service has an improved library full of classic films you can watch at home right now for free.
READ MORE: The Best Movies of the Year
The Dumbest Questions People Ask Google About Movies
These are all real questions from the “People Also Ask” section of Google. People asked these questions!