Putlocker

Search the movie: the form that opened the site

The 2015 front page of putlocker.is opened with a form, not a poster wall. Section: all, movies or TV shows. Title. Director. Starring. Years from and to. A row of genre boxes. People remember it because it let them find a film from a fragment, and the search page keeps every box. Type "Tom Hanks" in Starring and set the years to 2000 to 2004, and Cast Away and The Polar Express are the list. Type "Nolan" in Director and sort by rating, and The Dark Knight, Inception and Interstellar line up in that order.

The Title box is forgiving in the ways that matter. Half a name works. The original-language name works, and so do the other names a film goes by, so "Sorcerer's Stone" and "Philosopher's Stone" both open the first Harry Potter, and "Hunger Games 2" opens Catching Fire. The shorthand people actually type works: GOT, TBBT, HIMYM, TWD, AOT, JJK. Words like "watch", "online", "free" and "putlocker" are stripped before the search runs, so a phrase pasted from a search engine finds the film rather than nothing. And when two productions share a name, the year on the card tells them apart: the 2005 Doctor Who and the 2024 one, the 2002 Lilo & Stitch and the 2025 film, each on its own page.

The quick search in the header is the same engine with one box, for when you know the name. It is on every page, beside the logo, and on a phone it sits at the top of the menu behind the ≡ button. Type there and the results page opens with the full form already filled, so a quick search can become a narrow one without retyping. The search guide walks through every box and what to do when a search comes back empty, which is almost always a year that is one off.

Series take one more trick. Add a season and an episode to the name, "breaking bad s5e14", "friends season 3 episode 17", and the results narrow to the series whose season has that episode with a recorded air date. One tap opens the show, and the season page is one tap further, with the row you wanted in the table. It is the shortest route back into something you left last week.

New movies and featured: two shelves, two questions

New Movies answers "what is out". It is the catalogue's films in order of release date, newest first, and it moves every week as titles reach a service. This month the top of it is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Project Hail Mary and the summer's other large releases; scroll and it runs back through 2025, Superman, Sinners, Weapons, 28 Years Later, F1, and on into the years. A release date is the production's first release, the cinema date for a film and the first air date for a series, not the day a service added it.

Featured answers "what are people watching", which is a different question. It orders films and series by how much attention they are getting right now, and it is where an older title climbs when a sequel opens or a series returns. On the home page the featured shelf sits under the search form, the way the Featured Movies strip did in 2015, with the Trending tab beside it to switch between films and series.

The third shelf is Top IMDb, named for what people search and ranked by the TMDB audience score with at least five hundred votes behind every title. The classics dominate it, The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, with Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones carrying the television half. It is the shelf for a night when you want a sure thing.

New episodes get their own page. New Episodes lists the most recently dated episodes across every series, newest first, so a show you follow appears there the week its episode airs. It is the page to open on a Sunday night, and the ongoing collection beside it gathers every series that is still returning.

Browse by year: the way Putlocker was always read

Years was the fifth item on the green menu bar, and it was the way the old site was browsed more than any other. Pick a year and read across. The years page lists every year in the catalogue, from 1972 to 2026, with the number of titles beside each, and each year has its own page with the films and series that first released in it.

The year that matters most to this name is 2004. Four of the titles people search for with the Putlocker name opened that year: Troy, The Notebook, Hotel Rwanda and The Polar Express. The 2004 page has the rest of a year built for a wide audience: Mean Girls, Shrek 2, Anchorman, Saw, and on the television side Lost, House and Desperate Housewives, all of which started that autumn. Read the page top to bottom and it is a portrait of what people were watching when the name was new.

The years around it are as deep. 2003 has the last Lord of the Rings, the first Pirates of the Caribbean, Finding Nemo, Elf and Love Actually. 2005 has Batman Begins, the fourth Harry Potter, and the start of The Office, Grey's Anatomy, Supernatural, Prison Break, How I Met Your Mother and Criminal Minds, a single year of television that is still running in three cases. 2008 has The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Twilight, Taken and the first season of Breaking Bad. The 2000s collection gathers the decade in one scroll, and the 1990s and 2010s shelves do the same for theirs.

The search form's years boxes are the other way in. Set from and to and the results become a period rather than a date, which is how most people remember a film: "sometime around 2006". Set 2005 to 2008 with the horror genre and you have Saw, The Ring's successors, Paranormal Activity and the films that made that decade's Friday nights. Set 1994 to 1999 with no genre and you have the nineties shelf, Pulp Fiction to The Matrix, in one list.

The A-Z list

The A-Z list is the whole catalogue in alphabetical order, with a letter bar at the top to jump. It was the last item on the old menu bar and the page people opened when they wanted to see everything, and it still settles the question "is it on here" in a minute. Every title shows as a card with its poster, its year, and for a series the number of seasons and dated episodes, so the list is not just names.

The list ignores a leading "The", so The Notebook sits under N and The Matrix under M, the way a shelf would be sorted. Numbers come first: 24, 28 Days Later, 300, 9-1-1, 13 Reasons Why, 1923. Titles that begin with a symbol or a non-Latin letter sit at the end of the 0-9 page. It is the one page on the site where the whole catalogue is visible at once, and on a wide screen it runs eight posters across.

Pair it with a filter when the letter page is long. The search page sorted by name A-Z with a genre set is the A-Z list for that genre alone, and the address bar carries the sort so the link can be saved.

Reading a card, reading a page

Every card on the site is laid out the way the old poster tables were: the poster, and beneath it the title with the year in blue link type. The year is enough to tell a remake from the original before opening anything. Open the card and the title page begins under a beige title bar: the poster, the story, and a table of Genres, Released, Runtime or Seasons, Language, Country, Director or Creator, Stars, Rating and Status, then the blue Watch in HD button.

Under the story the facts panel lists the original title, the release date or first air date, the original language, the country of production, the runtime or the number of seasons, the studio, the TMDB audience rating with its vote count, and the other names the title goes by, which is where the romanised Korean title, the German release title or the shorthand everyone uses turn up. Every one of those names is searchable. Below the facts, the cast and creators, and a You may also like row built from the genres and the era rather than from what is popular, so the row under Hackers is other films of its kind and not this week's chart.

The browse pages behind the menu bar work the same way. Genres lists every genre with its count and opens to a grid. Country and original language sit beside it for the visitor who wants British television or Japanese animation and nothing else, and every grid on the site has the quick links to filter search, genres, languages, years and the A-Z list along its top, so no page is a dead end. Ratings on every page are TMDB audience scores with their vote counts; the label Top IMDb is what people search, and the page says so.

A title's page is also where the country lives. Change it there once, from the menu above Watch now, and it holds for every page and every visit. The choice is stored with My List in the browser, sent nowhere, and carried in the export file when you move to another device. It is the single setting on the site, and it is the one that turns the Watch now list into your list.

The films people still search for with the name

Put "putlocker" next to a title in a search engine and the suggestions are older than the trending shelf. They are Troy, The Notebook, Hotel Rwanda, Cast Away, Hackers, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, 28 Days Later, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Jingle All the Way and The Polar Express. People who used the site in its first decade remember it as the place that had the film from 2004 they wanted on a Tuesday, and the classics collection is built to still be that place: every film in the catalogue released before 2010 with a serious vote count behind it, two decades of the shelf on one page.

The 1990s shelf holds the films people rewatch rather than discover. Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption and The Lion King from a single year, 1994. Se7en, Toy Story and Hackers from 1995. Independence Day, Scream and Jingle All the Way from 1996. Titanic. The Matrix, Fight Club and The Sixth Sense from 1999, the year the decade ended on a high. Behind them the handful of films every catalogue needs, The Godfather, Halloween, The Exorcist, Back to the Future, Die Hard, Home Alone, and on the television side Friends, Seinfeld, The X-Files, Buffy and Twin Peaks, with every season listed.

The 2000s shelf is the deepest on the site, because it is the decade Putlocker's first visitors grew up with. It runs from Cast Away, Gladiator and Memento in 2000 through the three Lord of the Rings films, the Pirates of the Caribbean films, the Harry Potter films, Batman Begins, The Departed, The Prestige, 300, Superbad, Transformers, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Twilight, Taken, and closes with Avatar, The Hangover, Up and Inglourious Basterds in 2009. The comedies people quote are here, Anchorman, Step Brothers, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Mean Girls, and so is the cult favourite that gets searched with the name every month, Kung Pow.

A classic's page is worth reading before pressing anything. It shows the original release date, the runtime, the studio, the country of production and the TMDB audience rating with its vote count, which for a film from 2004 is tens of thousands of votes and reliable. The cast list is searchable: tap a name into the Starring box and the actor's other films line up. And the Watch now list for a twenty-year-old film usually includes a free ad-supported service alongside the rentals, which is one reason the classics are the best value on the site.

TV shows, season by season

Television was the second reason people used Putlocker, and it is organised the way they wanted it: series, then seasons, then episodes. Open a series and the page shows the story, the cast, the status, the number of seasons and dated episodes, and a row of season links. Each season page lists the episodes in order with the title, the air date and the running time, and a Reached this episode button on every row. Two hundred and twenty-four series are in the catalogue at the September 2026 update, 1,392 seasons between them and 24,588 episodes with a recorded air date, which is every episode that has aired.

The long runners are here in full, because a series that is handled badly after two seasons is exhausting. Grey's Anatomy runs to four hundred and sixty dated episodes across twenty-two seasons, Supernatural past three hundred, The Walking Dead to one hundred and seventy-seven, The Simpsons past eight hundred, and One Piece past eleven hundred, the longest table on the site. The long-running collection gathers the eighty-two series with a hundred episodes or more, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Family Guy and South Park among them, and the episode count on the card is the first thing to read there.

The complete series are the ones people restart. Breaking Bad, Lost, Friends, The Office, Prison Break, Game of Thrones: each has its whole run listed first episode to last, which turns the season pages into a checklist. The complete series collection holds the hundred and seven ended series with forty episodes or more. The ongoing collection is the opposite shelf, the seventy-one series still returning, from The Bear and The Last of Us to House of the Dragon and Stranger Things.

The sitcoms have their own shelf, because twenty minutes is a different kind of evening from an hour. Sitcoms gathers Friends, The Office, Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Community, Parks and Recreation, Frasier, Scrubs, Schitt's Creek and the rest, and the episode search understands them: "tbbt s4e11" opens the right row. The British shelf is separate too: British series holds Doctor Who in both its runs, Sherlock, Peaky Blinders, Luther, Line of Duty, Killing Eve, Fleabag, Top Boy, The Inbetweeners, Peep Show and Adolescence.

Anime lists every episode with its Japanese air date, and the season pages follow the cours the way the fans count them. The anime collection holds One Piece, Naruto, Attack on Titan, Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, Death Note, Dragon Ball Z, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Hunter x Hunter, Cowboy Bebop, Solo Leveling and Frieren. Western animation keeps its seasons in order as well: South Park, Family Guy, Rick and Morty, Bob's Burgers, Archer, Gravity Falls, Bluey and Smiling Friends, which people search with the Putlocker name every month.

Reached this episode, and where you left off

Every row of every season table has a Reached this episode button. Press it when you finish an episode and Putlocker remembers the row: the button reads "Saved here", the season page highlights it the next time you open it, and My List shows "Your saved place: Season 3, Episode 7" under the series. Press a later row and the place moves. It is the simplest thing on the site and the thing people use most, because a series watched across a month on two devices is otherwise a series where you have seen the same episode twice.

The mark is yours and stays in the browser you set it in. To carry it to another device, open My List, press Export, send yourself the small file it makes, and press Import on the other device: the marks and the titles merge, and nothing is overwritten. Mark the episode you finished, not the one you are about to start; the place is a bookmark, and a bookmark goes at the end of the page you read.

The TV shows guide covers the rest: searching by episode, how the air date relates to the service you open, what Returning, Ended and Cancelled mean on a series page, and how the ongoing and complete shelves are built.

My List

The button on every title page reads Add to My List, and the list opens from the blue My List button beside the search box. It is where the films for the weekend go, the series you mean to start, and the December films added in November. Each card on the list shows the poster, the year, and for a series your saved place, and a Remove button. The list lives in your browser, private to you.

Export and Import are on the list page. Export writes a small file with the titles and the episode marks; Import reads one and merges it. That is how the list moves from phone to tablet to the television's browser, and it is also the backup to take before clearing a browser's data. The list keeps until you remove the titles, so a shelf made this year is ready next year.

The viewing country is stored alongside the list. Choose it once on any title page and every Watch now button on the site follows it, on every visit, until you change it. Sixteen countries are covered: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil and New Zealand.

Watch now: choosing the country and the service

Watch now is the button under every title. Press it and the title opens on the services carrying it in the country you chose: the subscription services, the free ad-supported services marked as free, and the stores that rent or sell it, each with the price where there is one. Choose the service, and the title plays there in HD, with the subtitles and audio tracks that service carries, on every device that service supports, with its own download button for offline viewing. Putlocker stays where you were, on the title page, ready for the next one.

The country matters more than anything else on that page. A film that is on six services in the United States can be on two in Australia and on a rental store alone in a third country that week, and the free option for a 2004 film exists in most countries but not all. The country menu sits above the button; change it and the list changes with it. A title that is on no service where you are yet shows its options the week one picks it up, and titles move between services constantly, so a title saved to My List is worth checking back on.

Series move more than films, and later seasons sometimes arrive on a second service. Every season page has a Where to watch button that opens the series for your country, so if a season is missing on the service you expected, check the other services on the list before assuming it is gone. The air date on the season table is the date the episode first aired; for most current series the service carries it the same day or the day after.

Every service on the Watch now list is a licensed one operating in the country you selected, which is what makes viewing legal wherever you are, and it is why the list differs between countries. It is also how the site pays its way: some services pay a referral fee when a visitor takes a subscription or a rental, at the service's normal price. There is no premium tier, no membership and no "Putlocker plus"; searches for those come from copies that sold them. The safe and legal page has the full version.

Free, and what free means

"Watch free movies online free putlocker", typed exactly like that, is one of the most common ways people arrive. Everything on the site is free: search, the years, the A-Z list, every title and season page, My List and the app, with no account and nothing between you and any page. And when you press Watch now, the list for your country includes the free ad-supported services, marked as free, alongside the subscriptions and rentals.

Where the free options are is predictable. The free services carry a great deal of the classics and the 2000s shelf, which is the deep end of the site, and a good share of the long-running series. The newest releases arrive on the free services months after the subscription services, so for a film on the new movies page the rental is usually the only option for a while. Choose your country on any title page and the Watch now list on every title tells you at a glance which is which. The free movies page goes through it in detail.

HD, 1080p and 4K

Watch in HD is the promise the old button made, and it holds: the streaming services Watch now lists stream in HD and beyond, with each service's picture quality shown there. A film that opened in cinemas last week joins Putlocker the day it reaches a streaming service, in the studio's own release, which is the right moment to watch it anyway.

720p and 1080p are both high definition; 1080p is the full frame, and the difference shows on a television and disappears on a phone. Recent films, prestige series and the newer animated features were finished at or near 4K, and on a large screen that tier is worth choosing, often with HDR, which widens the range of light and colour and is frequently the more visible upgrade. A film from 2004 was mastered in HD; its 4K stream is an upscale, and the money is better spent on the newer title beside it. 28 Days Later was shot on standard-definition video on purpose, and its HD release looks the way the film was meant to.

The service decides the tier from the title's best master, the plan you are on and the screen. HD needs roughly five megabits a second to play without buffering and 4K needs twenty-five; on a data plan HD uses one to three gigabytes an hour and 4K six to eight. On a metered connection choose HD, or download in the service's app over Wi-Fi first. The HD page has the numbers in one place.

Phone, television, Fire TV Stick

The site is the same on every screen, laid out for a phone first: two posters across, the menu and the search behind the ≡ button, the sidebar lists folded under the page, the season tables full width, and the country menu and Watch now under the title's details. The Putlocker app is the site installed to the home screen. On Android, open it in Chrome and choose Add to Home screen, or accept the banner Chrome offers; on iPhone and iPad, open it in Safari, tap share and choose Add to Home Screen. It installs in two taps with the film-reel icon, opens full-screen with your list, your country and your episode marks inside it, and updates itself every time you open it. It installs straight from the browser.

On a television, the simplest route is casting. Open the title on your phone, press Watch now, choose the service, and cast from the service's app; the phone becomes the remote and My List stays open in your hand. A Fire TV Stick has a browser, Silk, and Putlocker works in it: type the address, bookmark it, search with the remote or the voice button, and Watch now opens the title in the service's Fire TV app when it is installed on the stick. Android TV, Google TV and most smart TVs with a browser work the same way. Apple TV and Chromecast carry the services as apps, and AirPlay from an iPhone works the way casting from Android does.

Downloads live inside the service you open. Most services download films and whole seasons to a phone or tablet in HD, with the subtitle and audio tracks you chose, and keep them for weeks. Press Watch now, open the service, and use its download button before the flight. That is the Putlocker download people search for, and it is the one that works offline.

Putlocker to, is, bz, pe, and the address to keep

The name has worn more suffixes than any other in its category. Putlocker to, putlocker is, putlocker bz, putlocker pe, putlocker rs, putlocker gg, putlocker xyz, putlocker ch, putlocker ac, putlocker il, putlocker org, putlocker is.org, putlocker 123, putlocker plus, putlocker pro, putlocker mix, putlocker today, and the plural, putlockers, which is the bigger search in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and India. Each was a domain the name lived on, or a copy that borrowed it, and each is still searched by the people who used it. The site people mean is the one you are on, and this is the address to keep.

The one address worth knowing the story of is putlocker.is, the movie site as most people remember it: the green film-reel logo, the green menu bar, the search form with director, starring, years and genre boxes, the featured films and the A-Z list. It ran from 2013 and was the busiest address of the name until it went dark in October 2016. This site is built on that design, measured from the March 2015 page, because that is the Putlocker people mean when they type the word.

"Putlocker new domain" and "putlocker new site" are searched whenever a copy someone used goes dark, and the answer is always the same: this address, which does not move. Save it to the home screen and the icon opens the site directly, so the question never comes up again. The address page lists every suffix, in order, with what each one was, and explains how to recognise the real site: the reel and the padlock in the O, the green bar under the white header, the director and starring boxes, and title pages with a Watch now button listing services by country, with no registration, no download button pointing at a file, and no page asking for a card.

A proxy is an address that passes your visit through to the site, and a mirror is a copy on a second address; both exist because copies of the name were blocked in some countries. The official address works everywhere. If a school, office or hotel network filters entertainment sites, the proxy and VPN page gives the two clean ways round it, which are your phone's data and a VPN you already trust; a proxy from a forum list is somebody else's site with the Putlocker name on it.

When Putlocker will not load

"Putlocker not working", "putlocker down", "is putlocker still available": five things cause those searches, and each has a fix that takes a minute. If the address will not load at all, switch the phone between Wi-Fi and data; if it loads on one and not the other, the network you were on is filtering it. If it loads on neither, wait a few minutes; a brief outage at the host is the only case where the site is genuinely down, and it passes. Most "putlocker is down" searches come from people using a copy on another suffix, and copies go down for good.

A page with no colours or a menu spread down the left edge is a page whose stylesheet did not load; reload once, and if it persists, clear the site's data and reload again, because a stale stylesheet from an earlier visit is the usual cause after an update. Search that stops at "Loading results" is a browser with scripts blocked; allow them for this site. Search that returns nothing is a query problem: widen the year range first, then try the other spelling or the original title, then switch Section to All. And Watch now showing nothing for your country is the country menu: change it, or check back, because titles move between services every week.

Video that stutters or freezes is playing inside the service you opened, and the fixes that work almost every time are to close other tabs, drop the quality a step in the player, reload the player page, and on a television restart the app. The not working page goes through every case, including the one where My List seems to have vanished, which is a browser whose data was cleared or a private window, and which Export and Import prevent.

Alternatives, and why the search exists

"Putlocker alternatives" and "sites like putlocker" have been searched for as long as the name has existed, and the reason is the suffixes: copies stop working, and the people who bookmarked one go looking for the next. The honest answer to the search is that you are on the site the copies were copying, with the search form, the new and featured shelves, the years, the A-Z list, every season of every series, My List and Watch now for your country.

When people compare alternatives on forums they are weighing four things: how deep the catalogue goes, how fast search finds a title, whether series are organised by season and episode, and whether the site works on a phone. Those are the four things this site is built around, and the alternatives page takes each in turn. If you want a second place for a particular reason, a service you already pay for is the right place for a title you will watch three times, and the Watch now list on every title names exactly those services, which is a more useful alternative than another clone.

Putlocker on Reddit

Search "putlocker reddit" and the results are the same handful of threads: someone asking whether the site is still up, someone missing the old catalogue, someone asking which of a dozen addresses is real, and someone who cannot get it to cast to a television. They are worth reading for the mood, which is affection for a site people used for years, and the thing people miss is specific: a catalogue that reached into the 2000s and 1990s, and a search form with year and actor boxes. That is this site. The Reddit page answers each thread in a paragraph, without the scroll.

The December shelf

Two Christmas films are searched with the Putlocker name all year round, Jingle All the Way and The Polar Express, and every December the rest come back. The Christmas collection gathers them so nobody has to remember titles at the end of a long day: Home Alone and its sequel, Elf, Klaus and The Grinch for the whole room; Love Actually for the evening after; The Nightmare Before Christmas for anyone who wants both holidays at once; and Die Hard, which is a Christmas film, and the argument is over. Add them to My List in November and the shelf is ready. The Christmas page covers watching them on the television, which is where December happens.

The genre shelves, and what each is good for

The genre pages list every genre attached to the catalogue, and most titles carry more than one, so a comedy search finds the action comedies too. The collections are the curated version, built for the way people actually choose. Crime and mystery, a hundred and twenty-three titles, holds the procedurals that run for twenty seasons beside the heists and the cartels; read the first line of the synopsis there, not the last. Sci-fi and fantasy, a hundred and sixty-five, holds Interstellar, The Matrix, Dune, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things and Doctor Who, the worlds worth a large screen. Horror and thriller, seventy-one films, runs from Halloween and The Exorcist through Saw, The Ring, The Conjuring and Hereditary to Smile and Weapons; check the runtime, because the best of these are short.

Action and adventure is the largest shelf at a hundred and seventy-three titles, Troy and 300 to John Wick, the Marvel films and the Bourne films, and the year on each card is what keeps the reboot and the original apart. Comedy holds fifty-eight films, the ones people quote, and the runtime tells you which is the light choice. Romance, twenty titles, runs from The Notebook and Titanic to Anyone But You. Animation and family, seventy-one titles, holds Toy Story to Toy Story 5, Shrek, Frozen, Inside Out, Bluey and Gravity Falls, made for the whole room, with the age rating enforced on the service you open. Superheroes, fifty titles, runs from The Dark Knight to Superman and from Arrow to The Boys and Invincible. Top rated series is the television shelf, sixty-eight series rated 8.3 and above by a thousand voters or more. And New in 2026 is where this year's thirteen films and series sit until next January, growing as the autumn releases reach a service. The classics hold sixty-nine films, the 2000s ninety-seven titles, the 1990s thirty-six, the 2010s a hundred and forty-three, and the sitcoms seventy series.

A short history of the name

Putlocker.com opened in 2011 as a file host, a locker you put files in, and within a year it was one of the busiest on the internet, because most of what was streamed from it was film and television embedded on other people's pages. That is how the word became shorthand for watching a movie online. In February 2014 the host renamed itself Firedrive and kept every user's files; Firedrive closed within a couple of years, and the name had already moved on.

A separate site at putlocker.is took the name in 2013 and gave it the look people remember, the white header with the reel logo, the green menu bar reading Homepage, New Movies, Featured, Genres, Years and A-Z List, the beige strips, and the front page that opened with a search form. It was the largest address of the name until October 2016. After it closed the name spread across the suffixes, and the searches for "putlocker wiki" and "putlocker llc" are searches for this story. The history page tells it in full, and the present is the site at this address.

Questions