Adam Driver's Underrated Time Travel Dinosaur Movie Is Streaming For Free

These days, movies that don't perform particularly well in theaters and are largely dismissed by critics and viewers often end up on streaming services shortly after their theatrical release. If you're not so keen on seeing a film to run to the cinema the moment it opens, wait a month or so, and you'll probably catch it on either Netflix, HBO Max, or Disney+ — given you have a subscription, of course. However, it's rare for a relatively fresh movie from recent years to become available for free (older classics like Bong Joon Ho's 2006 "The Host" or Dennis Quaid's 2000 "Frequency" tend to get this treatment more often).

But if you're a fan of dinosaur flicks and Adam Driver without any streaming subscriptions to your name, you're in luck. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods' action-sci-fi flick, "65," is now streaming for free on Tubi (in the US). Well, luck may be a stretch since this 2023 flick isn't exactly high art or a project that moviegoers were dying to see when it came out. It's a bare-bones story with a mid-budget and low ambitions, aiming for nothing more than mindless, primitive fun at best.

"65's" plot takes place 65 million years ago in the Cretaceous period and follows a space pilot named Mills (Driver), who crash-lands his spaceship on Earth while trying to evade an asteroid storm. It doesn't take long for him to find out that the planet is filled with bloodthirsty dinosaurs that are keen on having him as their next meal. For a second, Mills thinks of killing himself but decides against it when he stumbles upon a young survivor from his cargo named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), who will need his help to get off this planet alive.

Given the limited impact Beck and Woods' feature had on the cinema landscape, it's not a big surprise that it hit Tubi for free just three years after its release. Critics were not kind to it, as shown by its 35% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes (next to the much more generous 64% audience score). But critical reception and commercial performance are often two very different things, as we know, and "65" could've crushed it at the box office. But it didn't. While it wasn't the biggest bomb, its modest worldwide earnings of $60 million against a $45 million budget surely wasn't what producers had in mind when they greenlit it.

Still, when the sci-fi hit HBO Max at the beginning of this year, it quickly found an audience and climbed into the streamer's Top 10 most-watched movies, claiming the fifth spot. Who's to say it won't find the same success now that it's over on Tubi? After all, "65" does seem and sound like a movie that probably should've been a straight-to-streaming picture in the first place — especially considering the quality of recent features such as Joe Carnahan's "The Rip" or Ben Affleck's "Animals" that didn't even try their luck in theaters.

There are certainly worse Dino adventure films out there, and while "65" likely won't ever make it to any Best Of lists, it's decent enough to pass 90 minutes — especially free of charge.