Landing in February with a very economical offer allowed SkyShowtime to convince 600,000 new subscribers in its first month of existence in Spain. It offered a fee of 2.99 euros per month and the promise of a 50% discount for life to those who signed up in the first days. Market studies indicated that, by mid-2023, it would already have more than one million customers. However, its ability to penetrate the television conversation is as null as the questioning glances are recurring when mentioning the name of the platform in an everyday conversation.
In its first semester, in fact, it already had to face an image crisis. Grease: The Rise of the Pink Ladies, the prequel to Grease that was one of its main dishes, may not have been removed from the catalog like in the United States, but it was canceled. And, as rival platforms began to do, Paramount and Universal, which own the platform, made wardrobe staples like Parks and Recreation, Blue Bloods, Chicago PD, Deadwood, Why Women Kill or The Hollow Crown disappear. They had not finished installing as they were already in saving mode.
The difficulties in getting into the conversation in their first year do not mean that they did not have interesting, notable premieres or that they did allow them to enter into the inertia of the media. Bosé, due to the singer’s popularity, was his first title to make headlines in March with Frasier as the next promotional discovery, already in November and also because of how recognizable the brand was with Kelsey Grammer. But most powerful assets failed in terms of impact.
This includes Sylvester Stallone with the likeable Tulsa King or the reality show The Stallone Family; Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford with 1923, possibly because they were linked to the western and especially to a minority platform; the already canceled Rabbit Hole with a Kiefer Sutherland in 24 mode; Lioness with Zoe Saldaña, Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman, a conventional geopolitical thriller; the soporific television update of Fatal Attraction; the adaptation of Halo, the video game with 81 million units sold; or Passing lies, which did not even save the publicized label of “produced by Pedro Almodóvar.”
Of course, it must be recognized that, in terms of criticism, it had a few successes: the (essential!) murder comedy Poker Face, the surprising prequel Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the recent Fellow Travelers or the western miniseries 1883, which serves as a prequel to the Yellowstone universe that also complements 1923.
These difficulties were not an unpredictable situation. Apple TV, the service operational since 2019, serves as an example of how difficult it is to succeed when you do not have the penetration of Netflix or Prime Video: The morning show or Severance can enter the nominations for the Emmy awards or the Golden Globes and Para All of Mankind and Foundation may captivate science fiction lovers, but Apple’s only unquestionable success to date is Ted Lasso. It is not only a question of subscriber volume but of having a catalog capable of attracting, retaining and creating a routine with the viewer.
The disconcerting thing is that, unlike Apple TV or Prime Video, SkyShowtime does have a catalog and an experience: it is the merger of Paramount and Universal, which preferred to join forces to dominate outside the United States, where they operate separately via Paramount and Peacock. And, taking into account its supposed global strategy, Universal has sold some of its series to third parties such as Based on a True Story or The Resort to Movistar Plus instead of using the titles to expand its catalog.
With this first exercise as a precedent, it is striking that SkyShowtime is the first streaming platform to launch a major television commitment in 2024. I am referring to The Curse, a project by Benny Safdie (Diamonds in the Rough) and Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal). which has Emma Stone as a commercial claim despite the authorial nature of the proposal.
In the series, which arrives this Friday, Stone and Fielder are a couple who present a home renovation program and who, in short, are terrible people. Halfway between satire, drama and extreme shaming, The curse has the ingredients to be a niche series but get on the radar of critics. And, since we do not yet have the capacity to have a public phenomenon, a possible critical success is always going well (which, remember, was Amazon’s main asset in its beginnings).
It is not the only high-profile bet for 2024. In the coming months, SkyShowtime will premiere Apples Never Fall, an adaptation of the best-seller by Liane Moriarty (Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers) about brothers, the Delaneys, who suspect that their father could be behind his mother’s disappearance. Annette Bening, Sam Neill, Alison Brie and Jake Lacy lead the cast. They also have Mary in the bedroom
These, for now, are the main dishes of the coming months along with the second seasons of Halo and Los Enviados with Miguel Ángel Silvestre, the Knuckles miniseries that complements the Sonic universe, the television prequel to the movie Ted or the arrival of the films Asteroid City by Wes Anderson or Mission: Impossible: Death Sentence with Tom Cruise. In an industry that is still calculating the extent to which the strikes of scriptwriters and directors in the United States have affected projects in production, we will have to be attentive to the incorporation of new titles in the coming months.
Will they be enough to take the next step in the competitive world of streaming, whose viability is increasingly discussed?
