It’s nice to remember that not everything on the Internet needs to be a subscription-based platform with ads. On WikiFlixa public domain movie archive inspired by Netflix, you can watch movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Nosferatu” for free. You don’t even need to create 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 — meaning they’re free to share and distribute, usually because the copyright has expired or there was never a copyright at all. So, yes, most of the movies on the WikiFlix home page are from your grandmother’s age, but isn’t it fun to imagine what Netflix would have been like back then?
WikiFlix isn’t new, but it’s new to us, thanks to 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 film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, there are also a ton of hidden gems in there. As Rauwerda says on her TikTok, “Sometimes I really like watching things that I know no one else is watching, because what if I find out something crazy?”
On its home page, WikiFlix prioritizes movies that have many website links on their Wikipedia pages, as they 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 you don’t come across a historical Nazi propaganda film during your next night of “WikiFlix and chill”. (“While these [films] are perfect in an educational context, WikiFlix focuses more on entertainment’, a WikiFlix page he says.)
WikiFlix content may not be as remarkable as “Stranger Things”, but give it a try. Why not watch a Soviet musical inspired by Cinderella, a silent film relating to pirates, or a Japanese post-apocalyptic film which characteristics a guy who somehow played for both Boston Celtics and the Chicago Cubs? You can always watch “Love Is Blind” another time.
