The death blow to MUBI

I've been counting down to my deadline for ranking my 2023 movies (next Tuesday), but there's another deadline looming that's also been on my mind.

I have only about ten days before it's D-Day on MUBI, the streaming service that was gifted to me as a subscription last Christmas -- and that I got very little use out of, as discussed here. (And that changed its core movie-a-day model mid-year, another mark against it.)

Given the close proximity of the January 28th deadline to re-up for a second year and the January 23rd deadline for finalizing my list, I didn't expect I'd get much new information to help me make a decision whether to renew, especially since MUBI tends to focus on films not from the current release year, and films from the current release year are pretty much all I've been watching for the past month.

Boy was I wrong about that.

As it so happens, the last two 2023 movies I've watched -- Passages on Tuesday night and Mister Organ last night -- both have the MUBI logo coming up at the beginning of the movie, just as a Netflix movie would have the Netflix logo or an Amazon movie would have the Amazon logo. 

Both 2023 MUBI movies, and neither of them actually available on MUBI.

Oh it's a region thing. I'm well aware of that. I'm sure these are both plastered all over the front page of MUBI in America. It's something I'm well aware of from the same post above, when I discussed the lack of availability of Passages, Ira Sachs' latest.

But Mister Organ is a New Zealand film. If I can't even get a New Zealand film on MUBI in Australia, something fundamental is broken here.

I was actually pleased that I'd waited as long as I did to watch this film, which is one of those that made it onto my Letterboxd watchlist in a way I no longer remember, so I don't know where the recommendation came from and if it was even credible. As I've mentioned here, there are certain films I've been waiting out to see if they'd be available on streaming so I didn't have to rent them. That happened with Charlie Day's Fool's Paradise, which I talked about in my last post, and almost as good was what happened with David Farrier's Mister Organ, which was that its $4.99 rental fee had at least temporarily dropped to 99 cents on iTunes when I rented it yesterday.

When I saw that MUBI logo, though, I thought I might have paid a dollar too much.

So right then and there I scrambled into my MUBI app and began typing in the title to search for it. It was clear from the first few letters that it wasn't going to come up. But I perversely typed out the whole title, long past the point MUBI was telling me there were no matches, just to be sure that it wasn't a fault of their search feature. And since this was on my TV using an AppleTV remote, it took that much longer. I pointlessly officially clicked the magnifying glass after I'd finished the title, and sure enough, no Mister Organ. Not even the page they'll show you for most movies whether they are streaming on MUBI or not. 

So I got back to my rental version, which I likely would have done even if I'd found it.

The deck was stacked against MUBI after my last post, and as the title for this post would indicate, that situation has become even more dire.

But MUBI has one ... more ... chance.

I got an email -- an unreliable source of information about MUBI in my region, as I have determined -- earlier this week about Aki Kaurismaki's Fallen Leaves, one of the best reviewed films of the year, coming to MUBI on Friday. In other words, before my deadline. In other words, the only place where I could conceivably watch it before my deadline.

Since each film theoretically has a different distribution agreement, it's possible I will actually be able to watch this movie on my own MUBI in Australia. And if I were to have a positive enough experience with that, I could surely reconsider giving MUBI the axe.

But I just went to the page on MUBI for Fallen Leaves, and there is nothing advertising its arrival in a few short days. (Tomorrow, actually, by our time.) 

That may just be MUBI's lack of hype for its upcoming releases. More likely, it's a prelude to more disappointment, and the end of my MUBI membership.

To re-MUBI or not to re-MUBI

I have been pretty disappointed with my 2023 subscription to MUBI.

Which is no shade on the person who gifted it to me last Christmas, should he be reading this.

I'd been considering subscribing to the service myself, as I was enamored with their unique model of making movies available for 30 days, with one new movie appearing on the service each day. Each day you could check in to be surprised by some long-lost gem, some elusive title you'd been meaning to watch for years, or just some weird thing you'd never heard of but looked like it was worth trying out. Having the choices pre-curated by MUBI takes out some of the randomness of choosing a single movie from a service that may make thousands of them available.

But during the year, MUBI abandoned its signature format.

I can't remember the reasons for this. I'm sure it presented challenges and I'm sure the cost associated with licensing films for 30 days of viewing was prohibitive, relative to the benefit of the format, when they'd be better off just having it for a year or however long. If they wanted to license 365 films -- and I'm not sure if they do have that many -- better to make them all available for the whole year.

In theory, that's no different of a service from having 30 at a time -- in fact, maybe it is better in some ways. But it means MUBI is not distinct from a dozen other streamers, at least at the fundamental level of its structure. It might offer more interesting titles ... or maybe it just offers a bunch of movies you've never heard of for good reason. 

Then early in the year I learned that they got exclusive distribution rights to the movie in this poster, Ira Sachs' Passages. I've seen most of Sachs' movies and his Love is Strange made my top ten of its year. So it gave me a little thrill that at some point during the year, I'd be able to watch this on MUBI.

Not so much. The distribution rights were for the U.S. I am in Australia. I cannot watch Passages on MUBI. In fact, now I'll probably have no way to watch it before my list closes at the end of January.

Then there were the emails I would get from MUBI telling me about the new availability of some title. Maybe they got my geography wrong -- it makes sense as I have some services set in the U.S. (like iTunes) and some set in Australia (all the others) -- but in these instances as well, almost without exception, I would go into MUBI to try to watch the movie in question, and get nothing. U.S. only, apparently.

If services are going to offer different titles in different countries, they should at least figure out what country you're in so you are not getting constantly teased about movies that you can't watch.

Then the offerings themselves.

Things started on a good note when I watched Cleo from 5 to 7. The Agnes Varda film was a regret for me when I watched Varda films a couple years ago for my Audient Auteurs series, because I couldn't locate it at that time. I hadn't specifically sought it out since, but having it handed to me here gave me a taste of the exclusivity MUBI promised. I was tickled pink by the MUBI possibilities.

But as I tried to delve into random movies I wouldn't hear about elsewhere, some of them were just too random, especially this one called The Red and the Black that I suffered through one night. 

Another MUBI highlight was watching The Balcony Movie, which I had meant to catch at a previous MIFF and really liked. But then there were also lows, as when I watched Trash Humpers, which is now my lowest ranked film on Flickchart. I can't blame MUBI for my poor choice in that respect, but it didn't help with my overall impression of the service, regardless of who was to blame.

Is it possible that these are the only four movies I've watched on MUBI this year?

It's possible. 

I went back through the movies I've watched this year and did discover at least two others: Where is the Friend's House, which I didn't love despite it being Abbas Kiarostami, and Actual People, a movie about as bland as its title. I thought I might have watched The Pez Outlaw on MUBI, but if so, it's no longer available. (Six is a better return on my friend's gift than four, and seven would be even better.)

I've tried to watch others. I've used MUBI as a possible last resort when there was a movie I couldn't find on any other service that I needed to watch during a particular period of time. None of the times I've checked has MUBI actually saved me.

Then the real tease is that MUBI has a page for almost any movie you can think of, even if it can't play the movie. So you get to the page and you get all hopeful, and then there is just no play button.

This past week, as I realized my renewal would be due in late January, I had another determined peruse through the various featured films, to be sure I wouldn't be struck by another sudden rush of optimism about MUBI's potential role in my viewing life. I was struck by more disappointment, namely:

1) There were so few featured titles that the same titles kept on popping up in different featured categories. I'm not sure how one movie can be a film noir, a superhero movie and a romantic comedy, but that's the sort of thing I was seeing. Not that any of the genre assignments were inaccurate, just that the categories themselves were written in such a way to allow the same movies to appear in multiple ones -- creating the impression of more titles than they actually had, an impression easily disproven by the most casual memory of the titles you had just seen featured in the other categories.

2) There was one particular category that focused on 1940s classics. This is the type of place I'd expect MUBI might help me out. There were exactly three movies listed here, all bonafide classics like Citizen Kane. I don't need MUBI to watch Citizen Kane.

3) There should be a three just for good list-making etiquette, but I'm disappointed enough by 1 and 2 that 3 is pretty much superfluous.

If MUBI can't offer me more elusive classics from the 1940s, if it can't offer me the movies it says in the emails it is going to offer me, and if it doesn't even have a unique structure as a streamer, what good is it to me?

And yet I am thinking of renewing.

The idea of MUBI is still powerful. The potential it has to be great is still exciting. It has a lovely layout that supports both this idea and this potential. Simply put, it looks like the sort of exclusive place I want to spent my streaming time, with the sorts of undiscovered gems I want to discover.

Do I have to give MUBI another year to try to realize this potential?

It's hard to say. 

I have almost two months until my subscription expires. It's enough time to give MUBI a red hot go, to use the Australian phrase.

The problem is, these two months are when I'm watching as many 2023 movies as I can before I close off my list. MUBI does not offer 2023 films, as a general rule.

And when it does, like Passages, I'm in the wrong country to even see them.