There’s been some good streaming news in the last two days, following some bad streaming news. One is this: You can now watch Rocky on YouTube with little to no hassle.
The site, home to billions of hours of cat videos as well as many semi-legal and illegal bootleg movies, has started allowing entire, well-known movies to be streamed for free, with ads peppered throughout. There was little fanfare over this news, which came quietly last month and has only now been reported by places like Deadline. But suffice to say you can now watch the first five Rocky movies, Legally Blonde, and The Terminator on the site while suffering through a mere handful of commercials.
There’s no word on what other movies will be coming, or with which studios YouTube has cut deals. There’s not even a complete list of the available movies, which also include the Kevin James vehicle The Zookeeper and the Frankie Muniz spy comedy Agent Cody Banks.
But do you really need any other movie than Rocky III, the one where Sylvester Stallone’s working class pugilist is roundly upstaged by Mr. T? Then again, there is Rocky IV, in which Balboa solves the Cold War while Paulie hangs with a robot.
The other good streaming news is this: FilmStruck, the cinephilic service whose sudden death was announced in late October, has been saved after all, sort of. The Criterion Collection, a main part of the site, will become its own service in the spring, while the WarnerMedia section (i.e., most of the Hollywood classics) would be absorbed in that company’s own forthcoming platform. So if you’re a fan of both Legally Blonde and Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, you can rejoice twice.
(Via Deadline)
