Movies Anywhere is the best digital movie app by a longshot, and thanks to a new ‘My Lists’ feature, it’s about to get even better. For a few years, buying and accessing digital movies was a royal pain in the butt. There were various places to buy movies from, purchases were locked to those specific services, and that meant juggling apps if someone purchased titles on multiple platforms.
That all changed in October 2017 with the launch of Movies Anywhere. Regardless if someone buys a movie from Vudu, Prime Video, iTunes, or somewhere else, all of those purchases show up under their Movies Anywhere account. Just download the Movies Anywhere app, sync it with accounts from those other services, and all those titles can be accessed in a single application. Simply put, it’s an invaluable tool for anyone with a large digital library.
A little under four years since its debut, Movies Anywhere is now rolling out a feature called ‘My Lists.’ Available for all Movies Anywhere users as of August 24, My Lists uses a combination of AI, machine learning, and “a special algorithm” to create automatically-generated lists of movies in someone’s library. The goal is to help people have a better idea of everything they own and provide better organization.
How To Use My Lists In Movies Anywhere
To access My Lists, open the Movies Anywhere app, tap the ‘My Movies’ tab on the bottom navigation bar, and then tap ‘My Lists’ at the top of the screen. Users should then see multiple pre-made lists for all of their owned movies, with Movies Anywhere grouping them in unique categories. After playing around with My Lists for a few days, it’s impressive how varied some of the categories are. There are expected ones like ‘Tense Drams & Thrillers’ and ‘Crime Movies,’ but there are many unconventional ones as well. The ‘Middle Earth’ list shows movies from The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit, ‘Feel the Music’ highlights films with strong musical themes, the ‘Becoming a Hero’ list surfaces movies where a character rises to become a hero (for example, Big Hero 6 and The Lego Movie). If someone taps the ‘See List’ button next to a specific list, they’ll be able to browse all of the titles included in it — along with recommendations to buy other movies that fall into that category.
While My Lists is built on its AI foundation, Movies Anywhere also allows users to customize the feature to an impressive degree. There are settings to delete lists, add/remove movies from a list, or rearrange the order in which everything shows up on the My Lists page. If someone isn’t happy with the pre-made lists Movies Anywhere creates for them, they can tap ‘New List’ to create a list of their very own.
Overall, there’s very little to complain about here. As someone with a little over 50 movies stored on Movies Anywhere — many of which have been randomly added throughout the years— My Lists has done an effective job of surfacing titles that have long been forgotten about. It’s easy to use, the automatic suggestions are surprisingly strong, and all of the optional customization is the icing on the cake.
