Apple TV Plus finally adds this feature that other streaming platforms have — but there’s a catch

Apple TV Plus adds third-party content

By Joe Allen March 9, 2024

Apple

One of the things that unites most of the best streaming services is that, in addition to all of the original content they produce, they also have a selection of movies and TV shows that originally aired or were created somewhere else. This back catalog leads to a more robust library, and, at least in theory, attracts people who might be turned off by the limitations of seeing only original offerings. This is true for almost every streaming platform with the exception of Apple TV Plus, at least until now.

In anticipation of the 2024 Oscars, Apple TV Plus has announced that more than 50 older movies are hitting the service for the first time. Those films include some award winners and some more populist picks designed to celebrate the broad range of what movies can offer.

Among the titles that are being added on the awards-ier side of things include Titanic, Argo, Gravity, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Wolf of Wall Street, and both volumes of Kill Bill. In addition, the movie is adding blockbusters like 300, Star Trek Into Darkness, Mean Girls, Zoolander, Fast & Furious 6, and Black Hawk Down. All of these titles will be available in a new section called “Great Movies on Apple TV+.”

The Morning Show — Season 3 Official Trailer | Apple TV+

There’s a huge catch that comes with this rollout

Although many may be excited by the prospect of these new titles coming to the service, there’s a pretty huge catch that comes with these new movies. While you may have expected that this move would mean that Apple TV Plus was building out a consistent archive, these movies are time-limited to this year’s Oscars. Some of them will leave the service later in the month of March, while the last ones will expire at the end of April.

This new collection’s idea was to celebrate movies in general and highlight the stars of some of these movies when they also appear in Apple TV projects.

Apple has occasionally hosted content that the streamer did not originally produce, but those deals have been few and far between. Generally speaking, the streamer only hosts content that it owns, and once this limited window closes, the service will go back to offering a much more limited slate of offerings.

In spite of that limited slate, and in part because Apple is not a company that relies on its streaming service to generate profits, Apple has had a number of series that turned into genuine phenomena following their release, including Severance, Ted Lasso, and The Morning Show. They don’t hit every time, but Apple TV Plus has a pretty good batting average, and some subscribers seem pretty happy with those more limited offerings. The lack of a catalog of other movies and shows, though, does limit the overall reach of Apple TV Plus.

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Joe Allen is a freelance culture writer based in upstate New York. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The…

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