Warner Bros. Discovery has been premiering its new IP-based series on Max for the past few years in an effort to make them “the ones to watch,” but the company is now shaking things up with a grand plan to rebrand several projects as, wait for it, HBO shows.
Although The Penguin and Dune: Prophecy Both were initially announced as Max Originals, Deadline reports that Warner Bros. Discovery will now market them as HBO Originals as part of a broader effort to differentiate what type of content is released under the two brands.
Now, the shows will premiere simultaneously on Max and HBO, as will other big titles like House of the Dragon and Succession I have done this in the past. This always seemed normal to me due to the success of the bat Man and Dune Franchising and WBD CEO David Zaslav’s stated desire to flood the space with IP riffs. But what’s interesting is how the move speaks to the way WBD is rethinking its decision to prioritize Max, one of the most uninspired brands imaginable, over HBO, a name synonymous with the birth of cable television.
After revealing last month that next month Harry Potter, Lanternsand Welcome to Derry Max projects would be rebranded as HBO Originals, content chief Casey Bloys was candid with Variety Bloys explained that in many cases, the creative teams behind this new generation of shows “were using the same methods, the same kind of thinking” as those who have worked on traditional HBO shows. This is consistent when you consider the number of HBO veterans in the mix for Harry Potter and how Damon Lindelof (from Watchmen fame) Lanterns Will take cues from True detective.
But it also seemed like Bloys was admitting that WBD’s attempt to make Max a reality by simply naming it after a series people likely would have watched anyway was a failure and that the company had settled on a more sensible plan to “just call them what they are: HBO shows.”
Despite Zaslav’s efforts, many people still think of Max as HBO going through a truly wild identity crisis, like a corporation struggling to find itself after its parent company married a weird guy. This pivot to HBO likely means that Max won’t exclusively premiere WBD’s biggest, most expensive new series that it hopes will attract a broader audience.
That doesn't exactly mean that Max will have a hard time getting new material, but it does seem like WBD could have saved a lot of time and money by sticking with what was already working.
