Why are HBO Max Originals getting canceled?
When David Zaslav unveiled his $43 billion plan to combine Discovery with WarnerMedia, he said he would deliver $3 billion in annual operational savings. He’s now discovered some spare cash in HBO Max, after auditing business at Warner Bros. Discovery, which is now a single network.
Several of the original films previously available exclusively to HBO Max subscribers have been deleted. Such productions include the Seth Rogen time-travel comedy An American Pickle, Robert Zemeckis’s remake of The Witches starring Anne Hathaway and Octavia Spencer, and the Cole Sprouse and Lana Condor rom-com Moonshot. Accoridng to reports, this business decision illustrates a major move to remove low-performing content.
HBO Max subscribers first observed the movies, which also include the Doug Liman heist picture Locked Down and Angel Manuel Soto’s drama Charm City Kings, were no longer available when it launched in 2019. The removals were subsequently confirmed from the service by Variety. Warner Bros. HBO Max’s new release has also quietly removed several titles recently, including the Hungarian original drama series The Informant.
HBO Max still has to pay licensing fees for many of these films and television series, despite the fact that they were created by Warner Bros. Studios. The fees for all of those titles—HBO Max boasts “thousands of hours of series, movies, and special exclusives” —can get costly.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s decision to remove some exclusive originals from HBO Max comes as the company prepares to merge the streamer with the sister service Discovery+.
Since the merger took effect earlier this year, several top executives have had to make a lot of significant decisions. In June, HBO abandoned plans for a big J.J. Abrams-developed Demimonde series, and they confirmed this week that they had halted development on the DC movie Batgirl with Leslie Grace and an animated Scooby-Doo feature. Zaslav is expected to update the business on Thursday when the company reports its quarterly earnings.
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