The Best Climbing Movies on Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ – Climbing Magazine
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Get full access to Outside Learn, our online education hub featuring in-depth fitness, nutrition, and adventure courses and more than 2,000 instructional videos when you sign up for Outside+ Description: Part 1: Follow Alex Honnold and Cedar Wright on an ambitious human-powered adventure to summit all of California’s 14,000-foot peaks via technical climbing routes, with no ropes! New to the sport of biking, and having underestimated the scope of the challenge, Alex and Cedar soon spiral down a rabbit hole of sunburn, suffering, and a seemingly endless test of their mental and physical endurance.
Part 2: Any terrible idea is worth repeating… especially if like Alex Honnold and Cedar Wright you have a terrible memory and seem to remember your last “Sufferfest” as not that bad! Follow Cedar and Alex up a hilarious and endearing journey to climb 45 of the most iconic towers in the four corners of the U.S. by bike.
Editor’s Note: Absolutely hysterical, must watch, lore.
Watch Sufferfest on Outside Watch
Description: Presented by Moon Climbing: Climber David Fitzgerald is on a mission to climb two V15 boulder problems, Bügeleisen Sit Start and Big Paw, in Blocbuster, from Puzzleglass films.
Editor’s note: An aesthetic and contemplative film about the process of working limit projects.
Watch Blocbuster on Outside watch
Description: Reel Rock has done something interesting here: they’ve taken their original profile of Daniel Wood’s long journey toward The Process (V16) and made it a profile of a whole type of climbing: Highball bouldering. The film features everyone from John Sherman to Jason Kehl, Jimmy Webb to Nalle Hukketaival to Daniel Woods
Watch High and Mighty on Outside Watch
Description: Rising star Brette Harrington is on a global journey to push the limits of women’s climbing. Her quest takes her from Canada down to the big-wall proving-ground of El Capitan, Yosemite, USA and on to a free solo in the wild peaks of Patagonia.
Watch Brette on Outside Watch
Description: Follow American climber Margo Hayes on her quest to make history and become the first woman to ascend two of the most revered climbs in the world La Rambla in Spain and Biographie in France. Both 5.15a.
Watch Break on Through on Outside Watch
Description: Will Stanhope and Matt Segal are elite-level crack climbers and world-class goofballs on a mission to climb the hardest alpine crack climb in the world. Their epic, four-year battle in the Canadian alpine wilderness of the Bugaboos is filled with bloody fingers, belly laughs and a little too much whiskey.
Watch Boys in the Bugs on Outside Watch
Description: Every so often an athlete comes along who redefines their sport. Adam Ondra, the 25-year-old Czech crusher, is exploring a new realm of human potential in climbing. Since he was a pre-teen prodigy, Adam has broken rock climbing records across nearly all of its disciplines. Watch him as he tries to establish the world’s first 5.15d and make the world’s first ever flash of a 5.15a.
Watch Age of Ondra on Outside Watch
Netflix has come up in the world of climbing films. When we first started composing this list, they had only Dawn Wall. Now, they don’t have that, but they’ve got three of the best climbing films released in the last year.
Description: In The Alpinist, directors Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen tell the life story of Leclerc, the late Canadian alpinist hailed by just about everyone as the one pushing the sport’s razor edge. Which he did. It wasn’t lost on the producers that this film, which will go big, is arguably the opening and closing of Leclerc’s entrance into the limelight. That’s undeniably a heavy burden. In 2018 Leclerc died in an avalanche alongside Ryan Johnson, after making the first ascent of a new route in Alaska’s Mendenhall Towers. Leclerc was 25 years old.
From our review: “If Free Solo was about obsession, the Dawn Wall about depression and triumph, then The Alpinist is about falling in love… with mountains.” Read our full review here
Watch The Alpinist on Netflix
Description: Before Nirmal “Nims” Purja came along, the fastest known completion of all 14 8,000-meter peaks was seven years, 10 months, and six days—a record established by South Korea’s Kim Chang-ho without supplemental oxygen in 2013. After Nims Purja, the record is six months and six days—a time that even with oxygen (which Purja used) is going to be hard to beat. 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible, directed by Torquil Jones and executive produced by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (of Free Solo fame), chronicles Purja’s blitz across the Himalaya, which he called “Project Possible 14/7,” while also contextualizing his accomplishments in the wider story of his life.
Read our interview with Nims Purja here.
Watch 14 Peaks on Netflix
Description: Based on Jiro Taniguchi’s popular manga, which was in turn based on a novel by Baku Yumemakura, The Summit of the Gods is somewhat unique for an anime. While all its characters are Japanese, the animation was a French production and the dialogue is in French. The frame narrative, set in the early 1990s, follows the journalist Fukamachi Makoto’s hunt for George Mallory’s camera. The camera could prove whether the English mountaineer reached Everest’s summit on his ill-fated 1924 climb before dying, meaning the highest point on earth was reached nearly 30 years earlier than previously believed. (Note: The events in the film occur before Mallory’s body was discovered, without his camera, in 1999.)
Our reviewer: The Summit of the Gods also showcases the struggles of a modern climbing journalist who searches for meaningful stories in a world full of contrived “firsts.” It covers the classic climbing relationship: a driven, skilled (and somewhat reckless) climber paired with a slightly less motivated, more risk-conscious one. It depicts the lengths (and risks) that competition and rivalry can catalyze in climbers. I couldn’t help but look at the subtle rivalry between Habu and his contemporary, Hase Tsuneo, another soloist, and see figures like Ueli Steck and Dani Arnold, or Alex Honnold and Dean Potter.
Watch The Summit of the Gods on Netflix
Description: (Comedy/adventure) A young Senegalese-French man from humble roots sets out to climb Mount Everest to impress the woman he loves—and slowly becomes a media sensation. This film is based on the real-life story of Nadir Dendoune.
(English subtitles)
Watch The Climb on Netflix
Disney’s new relationship with National Geographic has breathed some high altitude air into the platform’s formerly meager climbing inventory. Now, in addition to Free Solo, the platform hosts some of the most acclaimed climbing films of recent memory, including Max Lowe’s Torn.
Description: Free solo climber Alex Honnold prepares to achieve his lifelong dream: scaling the 3,200-foot El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without a rope.
Editor’s note: It’s certainly the most famous climbing film ever made… and, despite crusty detractors, some of our editorial staff still thinks it might be the best.
Watch Free Solo on Disney Plus
Description: When Alex Lowe, one of America’s most celebrated alpinists, died with fellow climber and cameraman David Bridges in an avalanche on Shishapangma in 1999, he left a wife and three kids behind. In the weeks and months following Lowe’s death, his friend and climbing partner, Conrad Anker, who had narrowly survived the very avalanche in which Lowe disappeared, gradually stepped into Lowe’s shoes, marrying his widow, Jennifer, adopting his sons, Max, Isaac, and Sam, and striving to strike that balance between family and climbing that Alex Lowe had, up to the day of his death, been struggling to achieve.
Directed by Alex Lowe’s oldest son, Max, a new National Geographic documentary tells the story of Alex’s absence. “Torn,” which won Best Feature Film at the 2021 Banff Film Festival, is at once an homage to Alex Lowe—the climber, the father, the husband, and the friend—and a celebration of the family that survives him.
Editor’s note: Torn is less of a climbing film than a film about the things most climbers prefer not to think about: the strange and haunted space that a death in the mountains leaves behind. As our reviewer put it: “It’s a powerful meditation on what Conrad Anker calls ‘the value proposition of risk,’ yet it’s also an honest portrait of how death in the mountains ends up defining the people who live on in that death’s shadows.”
Read our interview with Max Lowe and Conrad Anchor
Watch Torn on Disney+
Description: Lost on Everest shines light on what happened to Sandy Irvine and George Mallory on their fateful Everest bid in 1924. Led by climbing author and journalist Mark Synott (author of a really great book called The Impossible Climb) and National Geographic photographer Renan Ozturk, the team tries to retrace Mallory and Irvine’s steps and, if possible, get ahold of Mallory’s lost camera.
Watch Lost on Everest on Disney+
Hulu, alas, only has only one (quasi-real) climbing film at the moment. So if you just picked up a Hulu account so that you can watch, well, whatever you picked it up to watch, be sure to check out Fine Lines while you’re there.
Description: It’s not about adrenaline or thrill seeking. There is something far deeper that drives the world’s most elite group of mountain adventurers to take life threatening risks. For nearly three years, director Dina Khreino interviewed these world-class athletes, listening to what compels them to leave behind families, friends, and everyday comforts, to risk everything for a fleeting glimpse into the unknown.
Editor’s note: While Fine Lines does not contain new climbing footage, it’s an interesting look into the philosophies of some of the top names in our sport.
Watch Fine Lines on Hulu
Description: When British alpinist Alison Hargreaves died on K2 (8,611 meters) in 1995, her son Tom was only 6 years old. A quarter of a century later, Tom perished during an attempt on Nanga Parbat (8,126 meters), scarcely more than a hundred miles away. It was a twisted coincidence that only the inscrutable machinations of nature could whip up. Their deaths left behind a father/husband (Jim Ballard) and a daughter/sister (Kate Ballard). The Last Mountain, a new BBC documentary from director Chris Terrill, examines the void the two climbers formed in their wake.
Our Reviewer: Current and archival footage is wielded without chronology, creating a sense of intimacy and timelessness that isn’t often found in similar climbing documentaries. This isn’t a film that was made at one point in time, it’s a tome of footage compiled over a lifetime. Watching The Last Mountain truly feels like following every step of the Hargreaves-Ballard journey in real-time, and that makes it worth a viewing.
Unfortunately, where the film falls short is covering Ballard’s relationship with his late climbing partner, Daniele Nardi, who perished alongside him on the Spur.
Read our full review
Price: $5.99
Watch The Last Mountain on Amazon Prime
Description: Based on a true story, North Face is a suspenseful adventure film about a competition to climb the most dangerous rock face in the Alps: the Eiger North Face. Set in 1936, as Nazi propaganda urges the nation’s Alpinists to conquer the unclimbed north face of the Eiger, the film follows two reluctant German climbers, Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser on their fateful climb.
(English subtitles)
Editor’s note: This film is amazing: climbing fiction at its finest. Watch it.
Price: $2.99
Watch North Face on Amazon Prime
Description: A former CIA assassin, now a college professor, (played by Clint Eastwood) comes out of retirement to avenge the death of a colleague and recover stolen chemical warfare secrets. He does this on the North Face of the Eiger, of all place.
Editor’s note: Another classic, if mostly because it got so much wrong and because a young John Krakauer criticizes the film in his great collection Eiger Dreams.
Price: $3.99
Description: In July of 2011 42 year old Ammon and Kait his 22 year old his girlfriend set out to climb the never repeated route of Wings of Steel on Yosemite s El Capitan Wings sat unclimbed since the first ascent in 1982 Shrouded in controversy and with a bounty waiting for the second ascent team there seemed to be no better person to climb it than Ammon But was Kait the best choice for a partner This climb would test of their ability and their relationship The story of Wings of Steel is part legend and part myth The first ascent team spent 39 days climbing the controversial route The result death threats physical assaults and a slander campaign that polarized the Yosemite climbing community for over 30 years Combined with footage shot during their ascent and told through interviews with the first ascent team their detractors climbing historians and Ammon and Kait the truth about the most controversial climb in Yosemite history is finally told.
Editor’s note: The story behind the first ascent of Wings of Steel is crazy, and the story of Ammon McNeely’s repeat of the route is crazy for completely different reasons. This film, covering a lesser known—and even shameful—piece of Yosemite climbing history is well worth a watch.
Price: $0.99
Watch Assault on El Capitan on Amazon Prime
Description: This film follows the legendary climbing photographer and Stone Master, Dean Fidelman. Fidelman was at the forefront of the free climbing revolution in Yosemite Valley and Joshua Tree during the 1970s, making photographs with John Bachar, Lynn Hill, Ron Kauk, John Long, and many other talented climbers. Over the past four decades, Fidelman has continued to document the evolution of rock climbing as a sport and culture. This documentary takes a look at his impact and influence as a photographer and climber.
Watch The Rapture of Free Soloing on Acid on Amazon Prime
Description: In 1970s America, the legends of free climbing start out as young outcasts who didn’t want any part of a respectable American dream. They wanted to create a world for themselves where the ultimate self-expression was a climb to nowhere. Up was down, poor was rich, and what everyone else found meaningless was worth dying for.
Watch Wild New Brave on Amazon Prime
Description: Four young climbers dream of climbing the Lotus Flower Tower, a legendary big wall in the Cirque of the Unclimbables in the furthest outreaches of Northern Canada. To reach their 800-meter wall, however, they first have to raft 550 km of the Nahanni river.
(English subtitles)
Price: $2.99
Rent The Nahanni Whisperer on Amazon Prime
Description: What does it mean to “see?” Shapes and shadows? Lines and color? When his friend dies in an avalanche, artist, rock-climber and dad Jeremy Collins goes to the ends of the earth to find closure and “see” his way up four new climbs. Drawn follows the journey from death to life while Collins goes North, South, East and West enduring challenge after challenge told in his trademark hybrid style of hand crafted animation meets on the fly live action.
Watch Drawn on Amazon Prime
Description: Straight talk from Batso. His ascent of the Wall of the Early Morning Light in 1970 was doubtless the high water mark of his rock climbing career. The notoriety surrounding this climb originated partly from the 27 days Warren and his partner, Dean Caldwell, spent completing the climb. At the time it was the longest period anyone had ever spent on a rock wall.
Watch Warren Harding: Recollections of the Wall of the Early Morning Light-1970 on Amazon Prime
Description: Ice climbing in Kentucky?! This adventure documentary takes the audience for a bourbon-fueled ride deep into the bushy hollers of Appalachia with a crew of harmless misfits as they race to search out and climb new ice routes before they’re gone, with a few surprises along the way. When most folks think of Kentucky. horses and bourbon are probably the first two things that come to mind.
Watch Gone Tomorrow: The Story of Kentucky Ice Climbing on Amazon Prime
Description: The character-driven history of the art, the sport and the philosophy of rock climbing in Yosemite.
Watch Vertical Frontier on Amazon Prime
Description: In the mountains behind the sleepy coastal town of Powell River, BC, a small group of rock climbers has spent decades quietly pioneering routes on some of the largest granite walls in Canada. As the last stands of old-growth trees harbored in these valleys come under threat of logging, the climbing community faces the uncertain future of a place that has come to define their lives and legacies.
Watch On the Verge on Amazon Prime
Description: In June 2011, free-climbing legends Alexander and Thomas Huber set their sights on a treacherously steep route in the Tyrolean Alps: the south wall of the Loferer Alm on the fabled Karma route. A new project was born.
Watch The Huber Brothers: Life On The Edge on Amazon Prime
Description: Stephen J. Wampler scales El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Stephen has a severe form of Cerebral Palsy and overcomes adversity and physical challenges by doing 20,000 pull ups over 6 days to summit El Capitan.
Watch Wampler’s Ascent on Amazon Prime
Description: When he was a child Kilian Jornet, the world’s greatest ever mountain runner, made a list of all the races he wanted to win and all the mountains he dreamt of climbing. The documentary tells the story of how Kilian Jornet, the world’s greatest ever mountain runner, succeeded in completing the historic double ascent of Everest in one week, alone and without oxygen in May 2017.
(English subtitles)
Watch Kilian Jornet: Path to Everest on Amazon Prime
Description: Inspiring stories of the men and women who climb El Cap in Yosemite National Park.
Editor’s note: Read an article in Climbing by the filmmakers, What Two Filmmakers Learned Documenting Climbers on El Cap.
Watch El Cap Report on Amazon Prime
Description: High and Hallowed is the story of the greatest American Himalayan climb, Everest’s West Ridge in 1963; the film examines the lasting impact of this climb and asks if anything can, or will, ever compare in terms of sheer boldness, commitment, and adventure.
Watch High and Hallowed on Amazon Prime
Description: Leo Houlding, Jason Pickles, and Sean “Stanley” Leary go deep into the Amazon to attempt a first ascent on the magnificent Cerro Autana.
Watch Autana on Amazon Prime
Description: Jim Ewing is a veteran rock climber and senior rope engineer at a rock climbing rope company. On Christmas Day in 2014, Jim fell over 50 feet to the ground in a climbing accident, a near-death experience that led to the subsequent below-the-knee amputation of his left leg. Before walking on a prosthetic, Jim was already climbing again, and before long, he began dreaming about his bucket list.
Watch Adaptive on Amazon Prime
Description: Never before have there been so many indoor walls; so many climbers obsessed with training; so many beasts of superhuman strength. That talent is not going to waste. We follow the fearsomely strong “Blocheads” as they quest for new lines and push the limits of human ability. It’s a story of adventure, rocky passions and mutant fingers. It’s the story of a search for bouldering gold.
Watch Blocheads on Amazon Prime
Description: Shifting Dreams is the story of Caroline Ciavaldini’s move from world class competition climber to trad climber and alpinist. The film takes a look at Caroline’s early years and her intense commitment to competition climbing, her all consuming focus on winning and how the death of her mother led to her seeking changes in her life.
Watch Shifting Dreams on Amazon Prime
Description: Majlis al Jinn is a huge cave located in Oman and it’s an epic challenge for the climbers Stefan Glowacz and Chris Sharma. After a 170-meter, free-hanging descent, they climb back into the light together from the deepest point of the cave.
Price: $4.99 (Free with Ecoboom trial)
Watch Into the Light on Amazon Prime
Description: Follows Robbie Phillips, Calum Cunningham, and Alan Carne as they attempt to open a new climb, ground up, on a 700-meter big wall called Tsaranoro Atsimo in Madagascar. The walls of Tsaranoro are as wild and bold as the country, the rock beautifully carved as if by providential hand, and the story is that of a real adventure—friends taking the risks that come hand in hand with pushing boundaries.
Watch Blood Moon on Amazon Prime
Description: Set in the expansive landscape of Jordan’s distinctive national park, Wadi Rum documents the unlikely story of two Israeli climbers, an affable Bedouin Muslim, and a professional American climber as they work together to complete a climbing route up Wadi Rums’ largest rock formation.
Watch Wadi Rum on Amazon Prime
Description: Michel Piola discovered rock climbing at the Salève, a huge cliff outside Geneva that has been a training ground for a number of leading mountaineers. After 30 years of route development, he is without doubt one of the great new routers and has left a lasting impression on the world of climbing. The choice and style of his lines has made his routes extremely popular among large numbers of climbers.
Watch A Passion for New Routing on Amazon Prime
Description: Among the last unclimbed peaks on earth there stands a little-known mountain in a remote region of China. A climbing expedition makes three attempts over the span of three years to summit the 6060-meter Yangmolong Mountain. Threatened by local villagers and challenged by unpredictable weather and dangerous rock and ice falls, the climbers must decide whether to give up or commit fully to the quest.
Watch To Be First: The Quest for Yangmolong on Amazon Prime
Description: Tales of the Tatras Peaks. An extreme climbing adventure on the ridge of the Slovakian Tatra Mountains. Western, High, and Belianske Tatras. They are connected by a gorgeous, logical and long ridge line formed by more than 130 peaks and towers.
(English subtitles)
Watch Footprints on the Ridge on Amazon Prime
Description: Nine of the outstanding climbers come together in this striking documentary about the ethics, values and the very nature of climbing. The brothers Ravier, Christian Ravier, Ekaitz Maiz, Mikel Zabalza, Arkaitz Yurrita, Eneko César, and Unai Mendia will show the unknown side of climbing in the Pyrenees.
(English subtitles)
Watch The Other End of the Rope on Amazon Prime
Description: This climbing documentary analyzes the concepts of fear, death, and life. Jordi Salas (Pelón) is a free solo climber. He performs alone without using any ropes, harnesses or other protective equipment, relying entirely on his ability instead. His mind controls everything. He continues to learn throughout his progression while getting up close with life, even though it may seem paradoxical. Featuring Chris Sharma and Dani Andrada.
(English subtitles)
Watch Solo: Climbing to Live on Amazon Prime
Description: Solo BASE Follows the path of David Fusté along with his friend Turko. The pair are not just BASE Jumpers. Instead they climb without ropes, using the parachutes in their backpacks as their only form of protection. David also has much respect for nature and the animals, being vegan and living his life as part of the environment itself.
(English subtitles)
Watch Solo BASE on Amazon Prime
Description: This Oscar-winning documentary tells the story behind Japanese daredevil Yuichiro Miura’s 1970 effort to ski down the world’s tallest mountain.
Watch The Man Who Skied Down Everest on Amazon Prime
Description: Jerzy Kukuczka was the first Pole to conquer the crown of the Himalayas—all the 8,000-meter peaks. Reinhold Messner beat him only by a few days by climbing the jewels of Himalayan mountains. Poles reigned the highest mountaintops of the world for more than 20 years. Watch the legendary climbers in this fascinating feature about extreme winter climbing during the early ’80s.
(English subtitles)
Watch Art of Freedom: The Himalayas on Amazon Prime
Description: Two men. Two goals. On mountain. Hotshot mountain climbers forge an uneasy friendship. A daring rescue just earned flamboyant Derrick Williams (Jason George) the climb of a lifetime, but safety man Michael Harris (Ned Vaughn) doesn’t blaze trails and rarely takes life to the edge. The climb in the Chilean Andes escalates into a test of wills, character and sacrifice that pushes both men beyond limits.
Editor’s note: This is a Christian movie aimed at teenagers. If you’re looking for a great climbing movie, this is absolutely, positively, verifiably not it. If you’re looking for a climbing movie that isn’t great and is didactic, it might be for you.
Watch The Climb on Amazon Prime
Description: Skiing Everest (2020) is the first documentary about the small elite fraternity of high-Altitude skiers who climb the highest peaks in the world in pure Alpine Style, carrying their skis and declining to use supplemental oxygen.
Price: $3.99
Rent Skiing Everest on Amazon Prime
Description: In the late 20th century, Slovak Himalaya mountaineering experienced world successes, but also failures. Through the eyes of one generation of climbers, the two-part Addicted to Altitude documentary shows the evolution of Slovak Himalaya mountaineering from the very first expeditions to the brave attempts on the highest mountain in the world.
Price: $2.99
Rent Addicted to Altitude on Amazon Prime
Description: Follow Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner and her husband Ralf Dujmovits as they try to summit the K2, Gerlinde’s last remaining peak for completion of the “Crown of the Himalayas” and see what love means above 8000 meters.
Price: $2.99
Rent Two on K2 on Amazon Prime
Description: The Summit (2013) tells the story of the deadliest day (in 2008) on the world’s most dangerous mountain, when 11 climbers mysteriously perished on K2.
Price: $3.99
Watch The Summit on Amazon Prime
Description: In 1985, two young climbers, Joe Simpson (Brendan Mackey) and Simon Yates (Nicholas Aaron), set out to be the first to reach the summit of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. They succeed, and the two embark on the treacherous descent down the mountain, only to meet with disaster when Simpson breaks his leg in a fall, leaving Yates to lower him the rest of the way with ropes. When a storm threatens both their lives, Yates must decide whether to cut the rope and risk Simpson’s likely death.
Editor’s note: A classic… but read the book.
Price: $3.99
Watch Touching the Void on Amazon Prime
Description: Released in 2001. Mountaineers are dying to reach the summit of the world’s highest ‘serial killer’ – and for some climbers, no price is too high. When double amputee Mark Inglis reached the summit of Mt Everest he was plunged into a storm of controversy after it was learned he had passed an incapacitated climber, Englishman David Sharp, leaving him to a lonely death high in the death zone.
Price: $1.99
Watch Dying for Everest on Amazon Prime
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