“We want to be HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix,” Ted Sarandos said a decade ago. By then he was already head of Netflix content and was about to release House of cards and Orange is the new black. He is now the CEO of the platform. And, it seems, he has gotten away with it. First series like The Crown, Lady’s Gambit, The Squid Game, Stranger Things or Black Mirror allowed them to succeed at the Emmy Awards, the most respected on American television, and now Warner Bros. Discovery could be closing an agreement to cede the right broadcast of original series on HBO, its star brand.
One of the series that would be at the center of the conversation is Insecure, the creation of Issa Rae. It’s about Issa, played by Rae herself, a young black woman trying to make it in Los Angeles while staying away from the city’s white inertias. It could be summed up as a cross between Sex and the City and Girls, in the sense that it talks about sentimental, sexual and friendship relationships between women, and at the same time it is told from a very specific point of view, that of Rae, who was considered a one of the most stimulating millennial voices on the scene. Broadcast between 2016 and 2021, it had five seasons, a closed ending and an immaculate run.
The platforms are still in a negotiation phase but, according to Deadline, this deal would not imply the exclusive broadcast of Insecure by Netflix. Warner Bros Discovery, which owns HBO, could continue to offer the 44 episodes of the author’s comedy in the Max catalog, the new name its streaming service has adopted in the United States after being called HBO Max. It is unknown what other titles are part of the conversations.
For the record, it is not the first time that an HBO original series can be seen outside the prestigious pay channel or the studio’s own streaming service. Series like Sex and the City or The Sopranos had broadcast reruns on other North American channels after their exploitation on HBO. Two meters under the ground or The wire could be seen on Amazon Prime Video in 2013 when Jeff Bezos’s platform had just begun to develop its first own fiction projects and, therefore, was not perceived as a direct competitor to HBO . And then there is the recent broadcast of Westworld or The Nevers on Tubi, a streaming channel.
Why, then, is this potential deal significant in the industry and looked at with a magnifying glass? First, because, as we had anticipated, there is a new inertia in Hollywood: the exchange of content. It has been discovered that the production and exploitation of the titles from the streaming services themselves is very difficult to make profitable: they produce original content but then remain static in the catalogue, generating residual costs but, after some seniority, without adding more value to the service and no possibility of exploitation. Consequently, companies are now considering selling this content.
One only has to look at the recent maneuvers of Warner Bros. Discovery. As we said, he sold Westworld or The Nevers to a streaming channel like Tubi after removing the episodes from his own catalog. It also cut much of its European output, allowing titles like Beforeigners to be on SkyShowtime right now or Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are on Filmin. He also announced that as a saving measure he planned to stop producing in a large part of the European market.
Following in his footsteps, The Walt Disney Company has erased Disney’s own titles such as the recent television sequel to Willow or the sports series We Are the Best or The Mister, which received critical acclaim for being good content designed for all audiences. It is unknown if Bob Iger, CEO of the company, is now trying to put the series on a rival service for a small fee or if the titles were simply removed from the catalog to save the costs of their exploitation on the streaming service.
But, of course, each movement of Warner Bros. Discovery with the HBO series must be analyzed because it is not just any brand. Since The Sopranos and Sex and the City premiered at the end of the 20th century, this channel’s production became the Holy Grail: a synonym of quality television. Its power as an asset within the Warner Bros. Discovery brand had always been understood, despite the fact that the studio has dispensed with these acronyms that mean Home Box Office for the new name of the platform. Whatever the service is called, a priori it should be the platform that had to be contracted to access both HBO’s historical titles and current series such as La casa del dragón, Somebody somewhere and The last of us.
With the decision to license series like Insecure to third parties, to be exact to its main rival in the industry, Warner Bros. Discovery relinquishes the exclusivity of its main fiction brand. Should it be interpreted as a desperate move by the studio, which has just been disappointed in theaters with the release of The Flash? Or has David Zaslav, the current CEO, exceeded his mission to monetize the titles in the Warner Bros Discovery catalogue?
