movies anywhere

Keep reading if you want free copies of ‘Ghostbusters’ (2016), ‘Big Hero 6’, ‘The Lego Movie’, ‘Ice Age’, and ‘Jason Bourne’.

No, ScienceFiction.com has not started endorsing piracy. These movies are part of a promotion for a new digital movie store called Movies Anywhere, which makes a compelling case for signing up with yet another content provider. Movies Anywhere lives up to its name. Its promise is to not isolate your content but make it ubiquitous. After signing up and linking your various accounts, be it iTunes or Amazon or Google Play, the aforementioned free films unlock and magically appear across your libraries. You need never visit Movies Anywhere again, but perhaps you should.

Here’s the origin story: Movies Anywhere rose from the ashes of the now ending ‘Disney Movies Anywhere’ which did the same thing exclusively for Disney. As a father of two with an Android, an iPad, a Roku and an Apple TV spread throughout the house, I am square in the middle of the service’s target market. Without it, I would be forced to exclaim that ‘Aladdin’ won’t leave the living room while ‘Dory’ is trapped in the tablet. (Don’t judge me until you try to explain digital rights management to kids.) It got to the point where Disney released the only Blu-rays I’d buy because I could trust that the redemption code for the prized digital copy was worth entering. I was thrilled when Marvel Studios and Star Wars added their catalogs to the service when Disney bought half of Hollywood.

Movies Anywhere is the same core product but with other major film studios on board. This means, when you sign up for the service, there’s a good chance movies bought on iTunes will populate your Google Play account and vice versa. Seriously, if you buy some movies through this provider and others movies on that provider, your libraries will fill out nicely. The big studios not yet on board are Paramount and Lionsgate. Get with it, guys.

Honestly, I never felt as though I owned the movies I bought online before now. They were rented, long-term, existing as 1s and 0s on someone else’s server. Even downloading them only meant only getting offline play on a single device. Movies Anywhere is a welcome solution, especially now that I don’t have to watch ‘Moana’ for the two hundredth time.