WikiFlix shows us what Netflix would have been like 100 years ago
It’s nice to remember that not everything on the internet needs to be a subscription-based platform with ads. On WikiFlix, a Netflix-inspired archive of public domain films, you can watch movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Nosferatu” for free. You don’t even have to make an account! Crazy, right?
A project of Wikipedia’s volunteer community, WikiFlix hosts over 4,000 movies from Wikimedia Commons, the Internet Archive, or YouTube that have fallen into the public domain — that means they are free to share and distribute, usually because the copyright lapsed, or there was never any copyright at all. So, yes, most of the movies on the WikiFlix homepage are your grandma’s age, but isn’t it kind of fun to imagine what Netflix would’ve been like back in the day?
WikiFlix isn’t new, but it’s new to us, courtesy of a TikTok by Annie Rauwerda, the creator behind the “Depths of Wikipedia” accounts.
While WikiFlix can introduce you to historic films like “Wings,” the first movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, there’s also a bunch of hidden gems on there. As Rauwerda says in her TikTok, “Sometimes I really like watching things that I know nobody else is watching, because what if I discover something crazy?”
On its homepage, WikiFlix prioritizes movies that have a lot of sitelinks on their Wikipedia pages, since those are more likely to be popular or interesting. But there is some degree of curation. The community around WikiFlix maintains a blacklist, which helps ensure that you’re not going to run into a historical Nazi propaganda film during your next “WikiFlix and chill” night. (“While these [films] are perfectly fine in an educational context, WikiFlix is more focused on entertainment,” a WikiFlix page says.)
WikiFlix content may not exactly be as binge-worthy as “Stranger Things,” but give it a try. Why not watch a Soviet musical inspired by Cinderella, a silent film about swashbuckling pirates, or a Japanese post-apocalyptic film that features a guy who somehow played for both the Boston Celtics and the Chicago Cubs? You can always catch up on “Love Is Blind” another time.
Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.
You can contact or verify outreach from Amanda by emailing amanda@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal.
