The Vault is a curated catalogue of public domain films — silents, noir, westerns, horror, and more — drawn from the Internet Archive and matched against TMDB for rich metadata. No ads. No paywalled classics. Just cinema history, free to explore.
Every film here is in the public domain, meaning its copyright has expired and it can be freely streamed, downloaded, and shared. The collection spans the full history of cinema — from the earliest silent one-reelers of the 1900s through studio-era classics of the 1960s.
Films are sourced from the Internet Archive, one of the world's largest repositories of freely accessible cultural material. Each film is then cross-referenced with TMDB to add posters, ratings, overviews, and genre data.
A scheduled scraper collects public domain film titles and archive IDs from Internet Archive collections nightly.
Each title is searched against The Movie Database API to retrieve posters, ratings, genre tags, and canonical metadata.
Mismatches are identified and corrected via a manual override table. The "Verified Picks" collection shows only films with confirmed TMDB matches.
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Copyright terms in most countries last 70–95 years after a work's creation or the author's death. Once a film enters the public domain, anyone can use it freely. In the United States, films published through 1929 are now generally in the public domain.
This means the golden age of silent film — Chaplin, Keaton, Griffith, Lang — is fully accessible. So is a significant portion of early sound cinema from the 1930s and 1940s, including many noir and western classics that studios have long since stopped distributing.
Browse the full collection — filter by genre, decade, or search for a specific title. Free 7-day trial to get started.