Into the Tubi-Verse

In May of 2015, Netflix’s movie library was approaching 5,000 titles. A dramatic contraction ensued soon thereafter: By 2017, that number had nearly halved. The library is now about a third smaller than it was at peak size. There are plenty of reasons for this change, but the two primary ones are that the long-tail value of “as much cinematic and television history as you can afford to host” wasn’t tremendous and that Netflix gradually realized that it’s more specifically in the business of production and curation.

Evidently, it was right on both counts. Netflix is the giant of its industry and has grown only more dominant over time. It has hundreds of millions of paying subscribers, exclusive rights to many of its most valuable properties, and the power and reach to turn Suits into a sensation. To understand the gold standard of the modern entertainment media industry, look no further: Netflix leads the way in scale, interface, and accessibility.

But we are not here today to discuss the peak of success, exemplified by a so-called “frictionless” entertainment product. Consider, instead, an entity that has taken the opposite path in most ways: Tubi, a platform that costs no money, is cluttered with obscure advertisements, produces unwatchable trash, offers a library of roughly 200,000 movies and TV episodes, and—with a crude algorithm and limited search function—is extremely difficult to navigate. Tubi is many times the size of Netflix in terms of offerings, but it’s not even 10 percent as utilized in terms of streaming hours. In general, people would rather pay a premium to be aggressively catered to than bother with something so unwieldy and unrefined.

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Tubi is, however, growing in popularity. Launched in 2014, it has progressed from a vague slush pile—something akin to the discount DVD bin at Walmart circa 2002—into more of a stimulating, treasure-laden maze for real heads seeking a hit of cinematic surprise that more carefully manicured collections can’t offer. Last year, the company announced that it had about 74 million monthly active users. It has surpassed more costly options like Paramount+ and Peacock and isn’t far behind Disney+. “These fast channels are kind of having a moment,” says J.D. O’Connor, a professor of cinematic arts at the University of Southern California. “Tubi has positioned itself as explicitly the Gen Z version of these [free streamers]. They’re adamant that this is not a kind of play for the cheap old people who just want to watch old shows that they’re familiar with. And their recent rebrand reeks of a marketing firm that told them, ‘This is the Gen Z appeal” … They were absolutely willing to spend time and money on a rebrand that would make it clear that this is a younger demographic project.”

Tubi appeals to more than just zoomers, though, and there’s significant overlap between its users and those who pay for Netflix, Hulu, Max, Peacock, or any of the other formidable paid-subscription streaming entities. Since 83 percent of Americans pay for at least one streaming service, how couldn’t there be? Despite their very real and regular investments elsewhere, they still hold space for Tubi—because something about its delights is so singular.

Part of it is certainly how it approximates the foregone experience of combing through an oversized video store, or trawling the depths of cable broadcasting, and finding in that morass of mediocrity a gem of screen history and vision. Some things feel better when you have to work for them—though, if you don’t want to work too hard, know that Tubi is currently streaming Barry Lyndon, A Fistful of Dynamite, La Belle Noiseuse, Doctor Zhivago, In the Heat of the Night, Blue Velvet, Raging Bull, Red River, The Great Escape, The Apartment, The Night of the Hunter, and Thief, among probably dozens more stone-cold classics that you’ll have to get on your own digital hands and knees to locate. Floating in this bloated pool of chum is genuine gold, some of the best movies ever made. Tubi has several masterworks by Japanese auteur Yasujiro Ozu. Tubi has Ingmar Bergman. And, if you scroll just two rows down after searching “Ingmar Bergman,” you’ll find a ridiculous-looking 2017 comedy called Obamaland Part 1: Rise of the Trumpublikans. Like many great thrift stores, Tubi is disorganized.

It would be wrong to argue that Tubi’s primary appeal is that it has good movies. Instead, its primary appeal is that it has lots of movies, and its budget-minded anti-curation approach to arranging them enhances a sense of odyssey. “When you’ve got the rights to that many titles, it’s not about frictionlessness,” O’Connor says. “It’s about strangeness and happenstance. You do have to go look for things.”

Offerings more pleasurable than fantastic cinema, for many Tubi heads, are the curious misses. Not total failures, per se; not terrible movies—though there are plenty of those on Tubi—but the pictures just a few shades shy of any kind of remembrance. They’re all here at one point or another. Like 1994’s Wolf, an uneven Jack Nicholson vehicle that can’t quite achieve its aspirational balance of contemporary publishing-industry satire and mythic werewolf saga but occasionally achieves unreasonable amounts of beauty. Hart’s War is a 2002 World War II character drama with Colin Farrell and Terrence Howard about American racism traveling with the troops to Germany. It’s a movie that seems, at times, to approach greatness but ends without memorable incident. Rush is a grimy cop thriller with an original soundtrack by Eric Clapton. It was the movie that debuted one of his biggest hits, “Tears in Heaven,” but it wasn’t one of the dozen or so movies from 1991 that stuck to any canon. Not a classic, not compellingly bad, not a cult favorite. Just a movie that once came out and now has nowhere to go but here.

Same for the forgotten Brannigan of 1975, one of John Wayne’s last movies. In it, Wayne plays a Chicago cop of questionable ethics, sent to England to extradite a roaming gangster. AARP John Wayne is turgid, lazily reciting the screenplay’s fish-out-of-water wit, but he’s still his eminently watchable self. Then there’s Crazy Joe (1974), a mobster tale with an especially cartoonish Peter Boyle, who, deep Tubi crawlers will learn, was a real movie star before he was the mean grandpa on Everybody Loves Raymond. So was the sourly cherubic Rod Steiger, who’s all over the service; both are conventionally unattractive men, skilled at playing unpleasant characters—once a formula for A-list success. Tubi remembers that.

It remembers the ostracized, as well. At times, it looks like a clearinghouse for canceled filmmakers. There is an abundance of the less-esteemed Woody Allen and Roman Polanski movies, and tons of Mel Gibson. While other services might be considering whether or not to prominently feature bigots or sex criminals in their fare, Tubi lacks sensitivity readers in its curation—or anything else that would be an enemy of affordability and volume. The service puts you in the sometimes uncomfortable position of deciding whether these exiled men should retain their grip on posterity. That’s definitely more incidental than purposeful, though—the controlling idea here is a business built around the remainders market, the movie version of books that distributors are not sure whether to try to resell or just pulp and recycle. “Tubi is part of Fox [since its acquisition in 2020], which is a super strange company now,” O’Connor says. “It doesn’t have its movie studio, and it doesn’t have the giant Fox catalog—that’s why The Simpsons are over on Disney+. What it basically has is its linear network, which lives and dies by the NFL, and its declining cable channels. … And then they’ve got Tubi.”

The result is less of a house style and more of an endless churn of cinematic penny stocks. It’s intellectual property arbitrage, an audiovisual flea market of which none of its organizers really understand the breadth and abnormality. The company’s philosophy seems to be that if you build a “video store the size of today,” people will come, and they will sort it out for themselves.

What Tubi does ostensibly pay a little more intentionality to is its original programming offerings. Since 2021, it’s released a new movie of its own roughly once per week. Most of them are bad, and obviously so from the titles alone: Titanic 666, Most Wanted Santa, Deadly Cheer Mom, Twisted House Sitter, Terror Train, Pastacolypse, The Lurking Fear. It’s mostly horror and thriller shlock, junk food for people who just need their screens to produce colors and noise. Only a handful of them even have blue text on Wikipedia—the rest are if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest fare, movies that could easily be ignored by their no-name casts for the rest of their lives and never get asked about. Their production quality is well below that of Lifetime or Hallmark. As one social media post put it: “Tubi outta control I just seen me at the gas station in one of the movies.” There is a growing audience for these outrageously bad selections, predicated on a gleeful embrace of the awful. An extremely optimistic view on this trend: Many powerful art movements begin with hard, formal limitations, and the resulting absurdities of Tubi’s anemic production crunch for originals—curving bullets, casually slain children, galling continuity errors—might one day look like the seeds of a bold, new visual language.

This slop runs a wide range demographically, but specific attention has been paid to the works made by, and starring, Black Americans. Most of these more memorable, viral hits—like All I Want Is You 2—are not actually produced by Tubi, just hosted there, but they’ve come to characterize the platform in a colloquial sense, regardless. “Is this a kind of populist creativity finding a way into the world or just a business exploiting an underserved audience to pump out cheap ‘content’?” asks Niela Orr in The New York Times. “Are these movies furthering Black representation in their own oddball ways or embarrassing us with lowbrow clichés?” Modern urban literature legend Quan Millz, known for titles like This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib and Pregnant by My Granddaddy’s Boyfriend, inspires similar questions, and he sees in this section of Tubi an entrepreneurial opening: In 2023, he started a GoFundMe to finance an adaptation of his book Old THOT Next Door made specifically for Tubi. Whether or not the artistic confluence is ever formalized, it’s clear that at least the shadow of a distinct Tubi style has emerged, intentionally or not. (To date, the page has raised $482.)

A slightly more expensive instance of Tubi’s productions was 2022’s Corrective Measures, starring Michael Rooker (Yondu, from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies), Tom Cavanagh (Ed in NBC’s Ed from 2000 to 2004), and Bruce Willis (in one of his last movies after being diagnosed with aphasia). It is depressing to see Willis so lacking his signature stoic pizzazz, and also to behold this movie in general. There is a special anomie one feels when watching someone really go for it in a broken context, as Cavanagh and Rooker do. The latter gives his dialogue more energy than its writers did, leaning into lines like “you fucking fuckface fucker.” Cavanagh plays someone named Gordon Tweedy, or “the Conductor,” who nearly breaks out of what’s supposed to be the world’s most secure prison by channeling electricity through his body. Though he gives it admirable effort, Cavanagh cannot perform his way through the small special-effects budget in this moment. And the so-called über-prison looks an awful lot like an abandoned elementary school.

Tragically low quality might not always be Tubi’s trademark, though. Especially if it keeps doing shrewd things, like the recent decision to be the American distributor for the BBC series Boarders. The show, a charming and insightful coming-of-age story about Black students in England’s predominantly white prep school system, has received praise from Variety, Time, and The Guardian, and in America it will be labeled a Tubi Original. Acquiring the series is, obviously, a lot less expensive than making it, but to many, it will look like the Tubi machine is getting sleeker. Tubi’s exclusives also include a lot of low-effort Vice and TMZ programming, true crime documentaries, and an animated series called The Freak Brothers, featuring the voices of Pete Davidson, Woody Harrelson, and John Goodman in a Rip Van Winkle affair about three siblings who really like to smoke weed and get into modern high jinks, just as they did back in the ’60s. In addition, they’ve got broadcast rights to the NBA’s farm system, the G League; random short-form documentaries about many classic rock albums, such as Steely Dan’s Aja and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds; cartoons about all of the Old Testament and New Testament; full HBO telecasts of old boxing matches; and hundreds of live TV channels.

In aggregate, these channels are like if the C-tier of a cable TV subscription was free. A lot of it is retro: 24-hour sports highlights from yore; channels that play only Johnny Carson, The Carol Burnett Show, Baywatch, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and The Rifleman. There are game shows galore, and talk shows, and home improvement shows. Plus various local versions of Fox from throughout the country. You can watch the news live from Bakersfield, Detroit, or D.C. Why not?! And, as always, there are diamonds in the rough—turn to the Warner Bros. “At the Movies” channel and you can catch Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa back-to-back.

“There was this moment when we thought that streaming was going to make the long tail valuable. That was the sort of utopian moment at the beginning of all of this,” O’Connor says. “And then we got rid of that idea. There was just not enough oomph in the long tail to make it profitable. The assumption was: Maybe only certain things held an audience. But what the fast channels suggest, again, is that the long tail does have value. And if you’re good at it, it is a decent business in a world where inflation is persistent.”

It’s especially good business when it’s free. At the moment, there’s no way to pay for Tubi, and no (legal) way around its frequently recurring ads. And, yes, because the service is less than premium, the ads can get repetitive. “The Mazda CX-30 commercial is the bane of my existence. I hate it,” says a user on r/TubiTV. Whether this is a flaw or part of its eccentricity is up to you.

What isn’t up for debate is that Tubi offers the widest range of possibilities of any streaming service out there right now. One person’s ironic Blaxploitation revival hub is another’s Criterion Lite, which is still another’s midnight-on-TBS-in-1997 reenactment machine, and still someone else’s best place to watch mediocre stuff from the ’60s and ’70s before diving into the world’s biggest archive of made-for-TV crap. The more that people realize how broad and stimulating its offerings are, the more likely Tubi is to impact the future of streaming. It might not be on purpose, but Tubi has built a kingdom of accessibility and weirdness that could start to make its competitors look overly staid and unnecessarily expensive. Netflix wants to bring you the perfect show in the perfect amount of time. But what if, in a world where the totality of all media ever is theoretically within reach, there’s more joy to be found in the hard work of manually navigating a catalog that’s as vast as it is beguiling?

John Wilmes is a writer and professor in Chicago. Follow him on Twitter at @johnwilmeswords.