Here’s something that will thrill Turner Classic Movies fans everywhere.
IndieWire can exclusively announce that Warner Bros. Discovery is making a huge new curatorial investment in the TCM hub on Max, expanding the brand’s presence there to include hundreds of classic film titles that weren’t available there before. The move follows a year of positive headlines for the beloved TV network, which celebrated its 30th anniversary earlier in 2024, announced the expansion of its celebrated TCM Classic Film Festival with a New York City pop-up in January 2025, welcomed the cast of “Pulp Fiction” to its festival in Los Angeles, and continued having celebrated auteurs make their “TCM Picks” from its monthly lineups.
The expansion of the TCM hub on Max is something that cinephiles have wanted for some time. The programming there will more closely align now with what’s on the channel (though, never fear, the beloved Watch TCM app will be unaffected by these moves), and a number of deep-cut titles are already on Max as of publication time including a collection devoted to Mickey Rooney, which goes beyond the obvious.
The first Rooney title you’ll see in his section on the TCM hub is “Words and Music,” the 1946 MGM biopic of Lorenz Hart that features some of Rooney’s finest acting, as well as a showcase of the studio’s top musical talent (we recently mentioned our love of the Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen “Slaughter on 10th Avenue” number from that film). There’s also a lineup in celebration of Humphrey Bogart’s 125th birthday including “Key Largo” (1948), “Invisible Stripes” (1939), and “It All Came True” (1940).
January will have a Cary Grant birthday commemoration including the films “My Favorite Wife” (1940) and “Destination Tokyo” (1943), and a George Raft lineup. February will be centered around 31 Days of Oscar (where Oscar-winning titles you don’t necessarily think of right away, such as the delectable “Neptune’s Daughter” from 1949, will get the spotlight, showing how TCM, at its best, always goes beyond the obvious) and an Elizabeth Taylor birthday tribute.
“At Max, we pride ourselves on our strong dedication to a robust library of fan favorite and classic films,” said Royce Battleman, executive vice president of Content Acquisitions at Warner Bros. Discovery. “Our latest expansion of TCM titles brings in even more timeless stories and invites viewers to relish in iconic cinematic moments on the platform.”
“By bolstering TCM’s footprint on Max, we are giving fans another platform to experience what they’ve come to expect from TCM — an evolving roster of celebrated films featuring Hollywood legends,” said Michael Ouweleen, president of Turner Classic Movies.
These moves should be warmly greeted by TCM fans. It’s not exactly been a secret that the TCM hub on Max doesn’t always have TCM titles: Even now you can see “The Goonies” and the Rankin-Bass version of “The Hobbit” on there — classics of a sort, to be sure, if not ones you’d actually see on the channel. There’s no indication those titles will go away, but these moves, and the injection of more titles you’d actually see on the linear network, do create a more unified brand footprint for TCM.
As an old slogan for the network used to say, “Let’s movie!”