HBO Max to remove Westworld, Love Life, and The Nevers amid “broader financial review”
It's a wonder that there's anything left on HBO Max at all
Aux News westworld
Having already canceled Minx earlier today (despite the show wrapping production on a second season that is now not going to air), along with announcing that the show’s first season will be pulled from HBO Max, Warner Bros. Discovery and its bloodthirsty boss David Zaslav have ordered a few more murders: Love Life, Westworld, and The Nevers are all going to be pulled from HBO Max as part of what Deadline grimly describes as a “broader financial review” of the streaming service’s slate ahead of the end of the year.
Love Life was HBO Max’s first original scripted series and a big selling point in its early days (“Look, famous person Anna Kendrick!”), so removing it from the service entirely is a pretty clear indication of just how fucked things are over at Warner Bros. Discovery. The anthology comedy series focused on a character played by Kendrick (who was also an executive producer) in season one and shifted to a character played by William Jackson Harper for season two, with both seasons focusing on the protagonists’ adventures as they navigated New York’s dating scene. A third season had never been ruled out until now, but now it has, and the show will also just be… gone forever, apparently?
As for Westworld and The Nevers, the fact that they’re being removed from HBO Max is somehow even more surprising than the loss of Love Life, because the two of them are real HBO shows—not HBO Max shows. The Nevers, a period sci-fi show created by some guy who stepped down long before it aired, had its first season split into two halves. The first half aired early last year, and the second half was supposed to air at some point next year. Variety says that sources believe the show will get to finish out its first season somewhere other than HBO, but who knows how that’ll work out.
Westworld, meanwhile, was unjustly canceled a few months after airing its fourth season—which ended on a clear setup for a final season that will now never happen. And while this will surely be lost on Zaslav, who seems to actively hate movies and TV shows, a big part of the show’s second season was about uploading the consciousnesses of the robot citizens of Westworld into a digital cloud paradise where they could be free forever, so erasing the show from his own digital cloud has effectively made Zaslav an on-the-nose Westworld bad guy. It’s like if the head of Disney literally collected the six Infinity Stones and used them to wipe out half of all Marvel movies as a tax write-off.
This all also means that any HBO project is basically one bad day away from being pulled from streaming—possibly forever. Westworld was never as big as it was when it first started, but there’s no reason to think anything on HBO Max is sacred at this point. The second it becomes morse cost-effective to remove a show entirely than to keep it and pay residuals to the cast and crew, Zaslav has made it clear that he will make that cut. And this is all for a streaming service that is planning to raise its prices and then jettison the only good part of its branding next year.
We say go for broke, Warner Bros. Discovery. You know how much money you could save by canceling season two of House Of The Dragon? Or if you pulled The Sopranos? Hell, get out of this business entirely and get into real estate. You can’t possibly be any worse at that than you are at this, because you are fucking awful at this!
337 Comments
On the plus side, I will be saving $15 a month not paying for HBO Max as part of my own broader financial review!
Underling: “Wow the White Lotus numbers are great! We’re gonna make a lot of money on this one. Season 3 is going to rake in even more”Zaslav: “Cancel it.”Underling: “What? It’s one of our most successful properties…”Zaslav: “Also delete the existing show from our servers. No one sees it ever again”Underling: “Sir, but the shareholders will…”Zaslav: (snorts a fat line of coke, rips open shirt) “Then find the Emmys it won last season and melt them down for scrap metal. Hire a hitman to assassinate Mike White. DO IT! NOW!”
Zaslavis is one of the best written antagonists of all time.
Which is why I keep calling him “Mr. Zsasz”, the DC serial killer supervillain.
In the inevitable biopic, How To Lose Easy Money, Zaslav will have to be played by Les Grossman
“Then find another, cheaper assassin to kill the first one so we don’t have to pay as much.”
That sounds more like Roger Corman than David Zaslav.
Why do people who don’t like things get put in charge of those things?
Sorry, but those are the rules. It’s in the Constitution.
Funny enough, a concerning number of white Americas feel comfortable putting people in charge of preserving the Constitution who have no interest in doing so.
Recently stumbled across an exception – the guy behind Chessie, the long forgotten early blog band that mixed ambient post-rock with locomotive and railroad sounds, was recently promoted to CEO of Amtrak. No idea if he’s a good guy or good at his job, but you know that motherfucker loves trains.
Another exception would be Kevin Feige, who was just another up and coming studio suit until someone noticed he liked superheroes so they figured they might as well let him run the superhero dept.
I thought you were kidding, but not, this is for reals. Love it.It’s sort of like what they say about the old studio bosses (think Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Selznik, etc.)—they were egomaniacal sunzabitches, but they LOVED the movies.
Thanks dad. That was a cool reference that made me look it up. I will check Chessie out but — from my brief research prompted by your posting — it’s not like the guy was plucked from experimental music obscurity and given a train job out of the blue. He was a train administrator first, music experimenter second. Anyway, pedantic so feel free to retort angrily.
No worries. He was 18 when he started Chessie and was the bassist in Lorelei before that and generally part of the DC DIY scene from a young agehttps://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/261179/the-railroad-underground/https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1435-overnight/https://www.chickfactor.com/chessie-the-chickfactor-interview/So he turned his obsession with trains into both his day job and his creative outlet. Definitely didn’t mean to imply that he was given a CEO job out of the blue.Anyway this guy was only on my radar because I downloaded it 20 years ago based off that p4k review, and then Chessie would pop up in those “ambient music packs” from the LimeWire days lol. It just tripped me seeing his name again and doubly so as the CEO of Amtrak given the music he made, and I thought it was cool.
Interesting. I had an ambient/new age phase but pre-Chessie. I’ll have a look. I love the railroad thing. Folk is my most go-to genre so I’m well aware of America’s weird musical obsession with railroads. Here was the first album/music I remember listening to:
He sounds a bit like David Attenborough, who became famous making nature programs but whose day job for almost three decades was climbing up the not-for-profit corporate ladder at the BBC. He’d do his nature programs as an extended annual vacation, then go back and drag the BBC kicking and screaming into the second half of the Twentieth Century—introducing BBC 2, introducing color television to the BBC, greenlighting shows like COOKE & MOORE, CIVILIZATION and MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS(!). He was BBC Head of Programming and they wanted to promote him to Director-General—a job he did not want and was not interested in, especially not when what he’d wanted to do was a comprehensive documentary series on nature. So he resigned and signed on to produce LIFE ON EARTH instead….
It’s not about “liking,” it’s about profit.
At this point, I might have a chance at becoming Pope.
Because artists don’t want to run businesses, they just want to make art.
The person running the business can still like the product.
HBO Min
The guy running HBO sure does seem to suck.
I have four episodes left in Westworld and won’t be able to finish until Wednesday I’m screwed aren’t I?
Oh, I think if you look around you’ll find there’s a whole torrent of ways to get it.
I see what you did there.
I’ll get some advice from my girlfriend who commits crime on the high seas. My pirate bae, if you will.
There’s Very Probably No way that will work.
It’s very important to use protection, what with David Zaslav doing his best to win the Dick Man Chode Award.
When good men found tyranny, sometimes the only noble course is to fly the flag of piracy.
Been keeping HBO for the movie selection and Last of Us next year, but maybe it’s time to cancel and get a VPN instead.
I thought everything after the second season was garbage so you might actually be gaining four hours you might have otherwise wasted.
With 4 episodes I have to finish just to finish (so I’m binging now and hope they don’t pull it at midnight)Though I will I say I find S3 to be the better endpoint than stopping at S2. But yeah the show asks the viewer to spend way too much time focusing on what is happening plot wise that you can’t focus on why it’s happening character wise. There’s so much misdirection that it makes it hard to care.
I mean, you can rent the show elsewhere. Just seems dumb they’re removing it from the platform.
There’s always physical media! Blu-ray stores need your money now more-oh just pirate it.
There’s always physical media!They can’t take THAT away from you—and believe me, they’ve tried.
No, you can still get Blu-Rays of recent movies and shows—I do that every chance I get for just this reason.
‘” have four episodes left in Westworld and won’t be able to finish until WednesdayI’m screwed aren’t I?”’Depends, do you have it on DVR? Do you think Zaslav would over look the prospect of profit from the cancelled and removed series’ DVD sales?
So basically Zaslav was brought in to smother HBO Max with a pillow? The Batgirl thing I could conceptualize as a viable way to take a tax write-off and save some money, but this just seems counter-productive. Just because something isn’t wildly profitable doesn’t mean it’s not still worth something. It feels less like he’s driven by making WB-D more profitable, and more like a screenwriter insulted his mother and he is exacting his revenge on every scripted project he can get his claws into. Just mercy-kill the damn thing already, rather than trying the “thousand cuts” method he seems to prefer.
I don’t even know what they get out of killing HBO Max. HBO is still a pretty prestigious brand-name, much more so than Discovery, which used to be high brow educational stuff and has now become lowest-common denominator reality trash. But if you kill off HBO’s streaming stuff, what do you do with it? Just sit on it? License it to Disney or Netflix?
Zaslav was head of Discovery prior to the merger, right? He’s the one that transformed it from high brow education stuff to cheap-as-dirty-reality-trash. He’s a one trick pony trying the same method on HBO? Maybe?
Who do you think is responsible for turning Discovery into lowest-common denominator reality trash?
I’ll give ya ONE guess…
Frank Stallone?
You guessed it!
Norm Macdonald references always get a star.
Idiot Americans who keep watching that shit?
Pretty soon, HBO is going to have their own Shark Week.
Unfortunately that reality trash makes a million times more profit than anything worth watching because people are too stupid for their own good
A factor these articles tend to ignore is that all the shows that get pulled will eventually be put out on syndication to other services in order to generate new revenue. Pulling them now just means they’re making the announcement that the shows are available.
Not entirely true. Some of these may get shopped around but some of them can never be seen again in order to get the tax benefit they want. If they put them out anywhere, in any form, they can’t write them off.
That’s completely false. There is tax write offs for canceling stuff but there’s no such thing as tax write offs for not rereleasing something.
Not entirely true. Some of these may get shopped around but some of them can never be seen again in order to get the tax benefit they want. If they put them out anywhere, in any form, they can’t write them off.
If they were planning on making loot syndicating Westworld, then shouldn’t they have, you know, FINISHED THE DAMN THING?
Why? The audience moved on and it would take too long to make the hundredish million that a 5th season would cost.
How does keeping a show on your servers that you own the rights to really cost all that much? They seriously can’t be assed to hand out 6 cent and 35 cent checks?They do know this is a great way to lose subscribers, right?
Evan Rachel Wood has had a tough few years I gotta say.
She really needs that sweet sweet Yankovic bump
It could have been worse — a decade ago she almost played Mary Jane in the infamous Broadway flop “Spiderman: Turn off the Dark” according to the tell-all book “The Song of Spiderman”.
I really love the song of spider-man book so much. An absolutely hilarious and brutally honest look at an absurd production.
I keep hoping the author and Taymor have found a way to reconcile.
Yeah, besides the “train wreck you can’t look away from” fun aspect of the book, the breakdown of the Berger-Taymor friendship over the course of the cursed production is sad.
I agree. There’s precious little information about that online.
I bet she wakes up every morning glad she said no to that. The Titanic of Broadway shows.
When you’re someone who’s given years of your life to servicing Marilyn Manson and you TURN DOWN a Broadway show, you know that show must really suck.
Welp, looks like its time to finally do what I was too cheap to do a decade ago and splurge on the complete The Wire box set so I can show my grandchildren what America was like
I’d do that myself, but it turns out that I don’t have a single device in my house that still plays disks of any type. Do they sell box sets on flash drives?
Some box sets come with digital codes so you can watch them digitally.
They’re called torrents.
I unfortunately have a portable CD/DVD drive that is my main way of watching DVDs that I have to cast to my TV. It’s still good quality once you get everything set up it’s just a pain in the butt.
4k disc players are backwards compatible, if you can find one.
The Wire boxset is worth getting and every once in awhile Amazon has a deal on it. That’s where I grabbed mine.
“We used to make shit in this country.”
“Subscribe now and maybe you’ll get to watch your favorite show before it disa- oh wait, no, it’s gone forever.”
This is why streaming, while convenient, is ultimately a crummy way to consume media. You never “own” it, and your enjoyment of it is at the whims of whoever wants to keep it on their streaming platform…until they don’t.It’s already frustrating to ping pong between streamers trying to see which platform has the movie I want for this specific period before it bounces to the next one.Now thanks to Zaslav, we’ve got shows disappearing from the platform…and everywhere else. If you want to watch Infinity Train, or Westworld, or Love Life…good luck? Unless you torrent them or pirate them, they’re just not available unless you’ve got them on physical media.
This is why streaming, while convenient, is ultimately a crummy way to consume media. You never “own” it, and your enjoyment of it is at the whims of whoever wants to keep it on their streaming platform…until they don’t.To play devil’s advocate, there are tons of people that don’t care, and have never cared, about “owning” media. It’s why the demand for shows in syndication doesn’t disappear as soon as they’re available on DVD, because there are plenty of people content to just catch Friends when it comes on at 7:30 on the local station. Streaming ain’t perfect – but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone claim that it is, and the convenience factor is huge for what I would guess is the vast majority of people. So I’d argue that not only is streaming not ultimately a crummy way to consume media, but if I had to “own” all the media I consumed, I would be destitute. Hell, before streaming I rented DVDs from Hollywood Video; I’ve never “owned” everything I consumed.Having said that, I don’t want physical media to go away. I’ve recently been purchasing more and more 4K Blu-Rays. But if I’m being honest with myself, 99% of the time they’re just sitting on a shelf and making me feel guilty about my shameless compulsion to consume and “own” things because I guess that’s just part of my personality now.
Fair enough on not needing to “own” media, but the one point in actually owning physical media’s favor is that if I want to watch a particular thing, I can, whenever I want, and no one can say no or make me pay more for it.With streaming, if I wanted to watch a particular show or movie, I’d have to make sure which service it’s available on, or if it’s been arbitrarily paywalled, of if it’s been removed entirely from streaming in which case I guess I’m out of luck.Originally HBO Max was touted as the one stop shop for DC, WB, Studio Ghibli, Adult Swim, as well as original HBO programming, with the implication that media from those companies/franchises would always be available to HBO Max subscribers. Maybe this wasn’t explicitly stated, but that was surely the incentive to get people to sign up. Then, as happens with most platforms due to whatever arcane agreements they make with each other, lots of their “exclusive” content started to migrate to other platforms periodically, during which time it would not be available on HBO Max. One of the initial selling points for HBO Max was it was to be THE HOME of the Harry Potter franchise media…then those movies started bouncing around to other streaming services.Now it’s even worse, as media is being completely removed from the platform. And in most cases, it appears to either be original content, or content that previously had exclusive arrangements to only be available on HBO Max. Meaning without physical media, there’s no (legal) way to watch them at all.
The other point is that the bitrate and overall quality of files tend to be higher on physical media than streaming or VOD services. And they usually come with special features that typically aren’t available on streaming services, yada, yada, yada. Like I said, I don’t want physical media to go away. I just think people tend to unfairly pit the mediums against each other. I think the reality is that streaming is more analogous to traditional broadcasting, not physical media.I’ve also had plenty of bad luck with physical media (i.e. scratched discs, corrupt files on otherwise pristine discs, discs loaned out to friends and never returned, overpriced discs, etc.), so for all of streaming’s faults (I acknowledge all the ones you mention; there are more!), MHO is that all of the mediums for consuming media ultimately have their pros and cons. Just use whatever works for you.
Yes, the quality issue is another big issue for me as well. Doesn’t matter how good your internet service is or how fancy your 4K TV is, a lot of streaming platforms still compress the shit out of their streams, which is especially visible when there’s dark or cloudy areas on screen. It’s awful.I definitely think there are things that make streaming worthwhile, and I prefer the on demand nature as opposed to broadcast/cable television. But I also just think there’s no denying the effect that streaming has had on physical media, and I think that’s because a lot of it was initially touted as “everything you want available all the time”. But thanks to bonehead corporate decisions, you never know when the thing you wanted to watch up and disappears.
Trust me, I hate bonehead corporate decisions as much as you do, but I’m not sure that the false promise of “everything available all the time” can claim the lion’s share of the decline of physical media. IMO it’s the cumulative effect of things like laptops losing disc drives, the rise of cloud storage, and the rise of digital VOD alongside, yes, the rise of popularity in streaming services. IMHO all of these trends have changed the average consumer’s habits to the point where, yes, it’s annoying that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince isn’t on HBO Max, but renting it for $2.99 on iTunes is still easier, cheaper, and faster than ordering the Blu-Ray from Amazon and waiting for it to arrive, or getting in the car to buy it from Best Buy.I do hope the niche market for physical media stays large enough to justify continuing its existence.
Removing entire originally-produced shows is a bizarre new low. Netflix may cancel half it’s shows after 1 or 2 seasons, but at least they dont dissappear.
Technically the Marvel Netflix shows did…
99% is generous. We watched Shazam on 4k disc because our cable wi-fi was twitchy a few days ago. First time we used the player in about a year.
Chalk up another victory for Piracy: The Better Choice™
ive had HBO max sine it’s inception but yes, with that implied intention that they own it, it will always be available her made me lazy and now I’m regretting not staying on top of Westworld. (my partner and I dropped off after seaosn 3) and was like well westworld is an HBO thing, it will always be here, one day Ill finish it, but seems like that is a no anymore. and Love Life, such a great show, I started like ep 3 as I saw my partner watch it and got hooked , again ill watch the first 2 eps i missed and now seeing it’s getting yanked has me bummed, maybe I can cram it tonite. OH and that Cristin Millioti show, Made for Love was so great and they also canceled and removed it, like WTF!! and yes , I always hate when there is a movie youre like, I need to watch it now and it’s the one that no streaming service has, OR it’s licensed to a cable channel so even if it’s available, you’re watching an edited version of it (or with commercials, ugh).does anyone remember when years ago Netflix had all the Albert Brooks movies and being naive , I assumed those movies would be on netflix forever and now, its hard to find those Brooks movies anywhere.
You can buy Infinity Train on iTunes and probably Google Play and Amazon and Microsoft Store too. So there are ways to legally purchase that are not physical media. Questions of ownership still remain but aren’t as tenuous as HBO Max’s library status apparently.
Jeez, is HBO gonna start charging for blue check marks now?
“Westworld, meanwhile, was unjustly canceled”
No, no it was not ‘unjustly cancelled’. It was very justified lol
I’m not paying for HBO if they are going to cut so many shows I enjoyed. Just try turning a premier cinamatic outlet into whatever the Discovery Channel is and watch it fail.
Zaslav’s strategy seems to be the equivalent of “why don’t they make the whole plane out of the black box?” That’s a hacky punchline and so is he.Yes, taking a suite of networks with quality but niche programming and replacing everything with shit-tier, lowest common denominator garbage that costs $5 per episode to produce will significantly increase their profitability. What we’re seeing, however, is that he’s a one-trick pony and that one trick doesn’t scale.
Oh I get it now, Gob Bluth is in charge of HBO!
“Check your app, pal, because you’re watching Fuck City, now streaming on HBO Max!”
Narrator: They weren’t.
*Now streaming on Max!*Now streaming on M!*Now streaming on
“I guess I’ll just take a piss on this million-dollar IP! Come on!”
I think there would be more magic shows?
Seven minutes had passed since Zaslav discovered the tax breaks
Yep. Said almost the exactly same thing in another comment. That’s what he did to Discovery. It used to be educational and informative and he turned it to trash. Now he’s doing the same thing to HBO.
Yeah, but why DON’T they make the whole plane out of black boxes?
And why do we park in a driveway and drive on a parkway?
Really makes you think.
“What’s the deal with airline food? Why don’t they make that out of the black box?”
This is totally bonkers and alarming. Moreso than Batgirl ever was. Like taking True Blood or something off because the show trailed off in the end. Insanity.
Yeah, regardless of the general public’s current feelings, Westworld was a BIG DEAL when it debuted. This is very surprising and disturbing.
Next stop, Game of Thrones, right? I know Westworld’s S3 and S4 had some issues, but the characters still pulled me in and I’d rewatch S1 and S2 over and over again if it were still available. If they pull this garbage with Watchmen, I’m dropping a giant squid on HBO.
If this fucker messes with Succession, we riot
I enjoyed The Nevers and would love to watch the rest of “season 1″ but if it’s an original HBO production how would it end up on another streamer/network? And wouldn’t they still have to pay residuals which is what they’re trying to avoid?
I’d love to see it too. Sadly, I think we may never get to watch the rest of season 1. I hope I’m wrong. I hope someone picks it up.
I get cancelling shows if they’re not pulling in the numbers but why on Earth would you remove a service original entirely? Is it really taking up that much bandwidth that might otherwise be used for more stupid fucking reality TV?I would’ve liked a 5th season of Westworld but being able to go back and enjoy the first 2 seasons from time to time was satisfying enough.Fuck this. I feel like within the next year or so, I’ll be back to just NetFlix and Prime, back to where it all began.
Yeah, pulling an OG HBO show like Westworld makes me worry that HBO proper is going to get messed with. There’s plenty of shows and original movies that were great but never popular (like Enlightened or Rome) that could just go poof. I don’t even know if HBO still puts out physical media for all of its shows anymore tbh.
Tubi’s where it’s at.
The good news is that eventually these various companies are going to undergo similar collapses of their unsustainable streaming spending, and be forced to go back to Netflix/Amazon, where it all began, to just license out their content for streaming.
I find it incredibly hard to believe that Westworld costs more to have on the channel than it generates in subscription revenue.
Love Life (which was great, btw), sure. Infinity Train (also great), probably.
But Westworld? There are people signing up specifically to see that show.
It’s starting to look like this isn’t data driven, as was claimed, but just “shit that Zaslav doesn’t think there’s an audience for.”
Maybe they used to. But realistically, who is signing up to watch Westworld now, knowing it will never be truly completed? People who have already seen it may rewatch it, especially S1 which is great. But new viewers? I doubt there are many signing up for disappointment they know is coming.Don’t get me wrong, hate these penny-pinching moves with a passion. But I at least get this one. The decision to cancel it before S5 made the show much less valuable as a long-term asset.
“You wrote off your own franchise? But why?”“Well, it was worthless.”“How do you know?”“Because we MADE IT worthless.”
I was really invested in Westworld because of the first season, but each subsequent season resulted in me being less invested. By the time season 4 premiered I found myself dragging my feet when it came to watching it to the point where I’d forget season 4 was actually out. I was actually really glad when they cancelled the show because I know I would have put myself through watching a show I so clearly didn’t want to see. Fwiw I did this to myself with Walking Dead too. Idk how many times I quit that show only to go back to it and hate myself for it. Yes I did watch it all the way to the end, and I will give the new spin offs a try.
yeah I felt the same for Stranger Things. I noped out after the first episode of the last season. Seemed indistinguishable from a John Hughes movie and I’m well past my teen years. It went from referencing 80s movies to just being a TV show with a shitty 80s plot and tropes. Put another way, nobody was treated that way in my 80s high school notwithstanding all the jocks, nerds and bully movies of the time. We sure don’t need another narrative repeating that ridiculous idea.
You’re right, the bullying plotline at the beginning of the season was just absurdly over the top. I stuck it out because my wife was going to watch it no matter what, and I’m glad I did. The rest of the season was fantastic. If I ever re-watch it, I’ll just fast-forward through anything that happens in a school where Eleven is shown or roller rink because those are the only two places where anything happens in that storyline.
I know I’ll finish out Stranger Things so I’ll reserve full judgement until then, but I totally get where you’re coming from.
But realistically, who is signing up to watch Westworld now, knowing it will never be truly completed?
A Facebook friend was going to watch the first season this weekend, since he heard that was good (and it is).
Technically, he has a subscription and it was the last thing he was doing before pulling the plug on it. Still, that’s a month of revenue gone.
“The decision to cancel it before S5 made the show much less valuable as a long-term asset.”…I thought season 3 already did that?
“But Westworld? There are people signing up specifically to see that show.”Given its poor ratings, I’d say its probably a financially insignificant amount. And it was not a cheap show to make.There are people who sign up to watch just about any show.
Even less cheap since WB cancelled the fifth season after all the actors had already signed binding contracts, so now the entire cast has to be paid 100% of their salaries for the season, without any of them actually having to do anything, and with zero chance of WB ever making back a penny of that investment.
It’s no wonder Zaslav has to burn the HBO library down to keep the lights on when he’s making decisions like that.
Paying the entire cast 100% of their salaries without any of them having to actually do anything is pretty satisfying on a schadenfreude level, but cast salaries are just a fraction of the total cost of a production. Deciding to film a fifth season simply because the cast is already paid is pretty textbook “sunk cost fallacy” reasoning.I don’t pretend to be a Hollywood accountant, but given the fact that season 4 ended not too long ago, I wonder if the numbers were simply bad enough that it wasn’t hard to believe a fifth season wouldn’t turn a profit on the investment.
If everyone’s tied into a contract, just make a really short season or a couple of direct to video movies.
But how much does it actually cost to host the show for streaming? It’s got to be tiny. Does everyone get royalties per number of streams or something? I can’t imagine the cost of removing it from the service being less than the cost of hosting the series plus whatever tiny amount of people it still brings in.
I think you answered your own question—-it probably costs them a good deal of money per “needle drop” or maybe even a fee for keeping it available on their service.Its also probably enticing to any 3rd party they’d want to sell it to which may be interested in acquiring it for distribution—not having it available on another platform at the same time.
Yes, they get residuals for views. So every time someone watches a show that isn’t the reason why that customer doesn’t cancel their subscription, the streaming service is losing money. In the long term, this is bad because streamers are going to make nothing but focused-grouped shows that they know keep people subscribing. That’s been Disney’s MO from the beginning, most of their new content is a drip-feed of Star Wars and Marvel.
I have gone back to (various iterations of) HBO Max a few times for Westworld now… I was pretty sad when they cancelled it, especially when they’re going to be paying out the nose for a season they’re not making anyway, but this is just a slap in the face. Even if something isn’t generating as much money as you’d like it can be worth it to cultivate faith and trust in your fanbase, otherwise people won’t bother watching season 1 of your new shows because they figure you’ll probably just end up canceling it anyway. If this is how they’re going to treat their best shows and fans then screw them, I won’t be going back again.
The real fucky thing here is not just myself but five of my friends were going to start a first time watch of Westworld for our podcast about doomed TV shows.ETA: I should add that three of them were going to subscribe to HBO Max for the first time.
Switch to making a TV show about doomed podcasts.
But Westworld? There are people signing up specifically to see that show.Maybe when it was airing, but the show was already cancelled, and the ratings supposedly took a nose dive since season 2. I don’t think Westworld was driving many HBO Max subscriptions anymore.
Yeah even if people didn’t like the later seasons they might still be rewatching the first few
This is entirely about not having to pay residuals or broadcast rights fees.
WB got loaded up with WAY too much debt between its AT&T tenure and what Zaslav had to borrow to pull off the merger. Add in the popping of the streaming growth bubble and there’s pretty much no possible way for WB Discovery to grow it’s way out of having to service $53 billion in debt.
This is it exactly — all about that debt.Everyone here is saying “Zaslav hates movies / TV / streaming”, but it’s all about saving pennies, and betting that these actions don’t drive away existing subs and / or slow down new ones.Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked for companies in similar situations and it wasn’t pretty at all. (Think cutting the coffee service, bringing your own supplies, etc.)
Same. I remember once asking someone where the printer paper was.“Oh, no…you have to bring your own.”And yep, they dropped coffee service.
All they’ll have to do is get a billion people to subscribe to Max for three years each; how hard can that be with the 90-Day-verse as their prime offering?
I wonder if Zaslav got screwed by rising interest rates? The original plan might well have been to just keep rolling over the debt indefinitely, and as long as you could borrow at 1% interest that might have even worked. A very different ball game at 7.5%
Perhaps part of Zaslav’s plan is to pull cancel and pull these HBO series and then sell them off. I can see some of these properties moving to Netflix, Hulu, and maybe even Disney.
Is this a case of “saving the company” or more of a “cut ALL the expenses so I can claim to have increased profits for a massive bonus before I jump ship on the drained husk of the once thriving company” situation?
Bingo!
Yes.
This is entirely perplexing to me. They own the shows, don’t they? They’re not paying anyone else for the streaming rights? How is this beneficial?
They still have to pay residuals to the talent that made the shows. It’s likely not much per episode but it’s not zero.
That’s insanely penny wise, pound foolish.
I actually think this is the main reason. Someone looked at the residuals and was all “Why are we paying for shows we cancelled?” I read somewhere that this may also be a sort of warning to future content creators: Don’t ask for too much in the residuals agreement, or we won’t make the show.
They can free up space on their servers? Seems like a minor savings, but hey.
Zaslav has a huge stash of porn and he needs to back it up somewhere.
Honestly at the amount of server space you need to run a streaming service I can fathom removing a few season of a show saves them more then a few dollars.
I used to work in billing for a data center company and a few big streamers had accounts there, I can confirm that the costs are significant.
In theory, they have to be paying some kind of residuals to actors, writers, directors, etc. But I can’t imagine its really that onerous of a cost.
I just don’t think the guy has any idea what he’s doing.
Yeah HBO is the oldest / original For-Pay Tv subsciption service and it has survived for so long because it’s been genuinely good for five decades. Now new management is in charge and they think they can continue to generate revenue for just existing. Having access to HBO’s backlog was 9/10ths of the reason to get hbo and having access to the new content was the other reason. If you can’t watch their backlog and there is no guarantee you can watch the new content either there is no reason to buy it. Whenever ATT stops paying for my HBO for free i’m not paying out of pocket for HBO and I know i’m not the only one HBO/discovery is going to have a very rude awakening once they cut over services to their new app.
Yeah I understand those residuals, but it seems like, surely the contracts aren’t structured in a way that the residuals generated by someone watching is more than what they pay to subscribe?
Streaming is a goddamn mess. The problem is that it all is done in the aggregate— you don’t actually pay to watch any one show with a service like Netflix or HBO. You just pay for the whole catalog. I’m not even sure how they do residuals for platforms like HBO Max- its one of the things that’s going to be a very big sticking point in the upcoming WGA/DGA/SAG negotiations.But at the same time, if you look at how that money comes in to the streamer, it’s a mess there too. If a customer pays $20/month, and they watch 100 hours of TV a month (3 hours a day or so), they’re paying 20 cents an hour for their entertainment. That doesn’t carve up very well, at least not compared to the way that residuals for a theatrical release or network TV did.
But at rates per view that low, is it possible that they could find themselves with content that actually isn’t paying off? Maybe. There’s also all the bullshit tax shenanigans that they can pull, the kind of stuff that led to Batgirl being shelved. I’m sure some of that factors in as well.
This is exactly the problem.
But most people will keep subscribing even without Westworld, so they aren’t actually paying anything to stream Westworld.
I think you underestimate how risk-averse consumers can be – if I were considering signing up to a new service and it had a reputation for dropping shows from their catalogue, I’d go with another one. Like say, Disney+, which will always hold onto their own shows. This is the exact reason Netflix has been losing subscribers the last few years, because they were becoming known for having slightly less content than they used to have.
Netflix lost too much of their compelling content because the contracts for their non-original shows expired and they stopped making good original shows. They’re an example of what happens if you go too far. Netflix couldn’t control losing contracts for stuff like friends, but if they still put out original prestige TV like Orange is The New Black or the first 4 seasons of House of Cards they wouldn’t have lost so many subscribers.
I think a distributor only pays residuals if something is actually airing/streaming. If it’s sitting on the shelf it’s not earning any money, so nobody’s getting paid for it.Maybe there are some “pay-or-play” deals attached, but those would only be for showrunners and stars that previous regimes, at least, would be so high on they’d be certain to run anything they produced.
They probably ran the numbers and saw that the royalties they pay keeping it on the service probably are not worth the cost but if they can get another streaming service to pay for rights all the better especially if they have unaired episodes.
It’s not just TV – look at the other streaming services like Paramount and Peacock and there are a boatload of WB movies being licenced out where you would think they would be in house on their own service.
My guess is WD under Zaslov believes they’d make more money selling the streaming and broadcast rights of their shows and movies to other companies than continuing to put it on their own platform (HBO Max). The bigger story is that the studios are finding it challenging to make money from owning and operating their own streaming platforms.
Bingo. And they’re trying to save face while they figure it out.
Which, let’s remember, is what they were doing in the first place before deciding to be stupid rather than just continuing to license their shit out to Netflix/Amazon and rake in easy dollars.
They basically want to save money now and announce that the shows are available to syndicate so they can make money in the future.
There are tax writeoffs involved, but it’s a one time payout. Incredibly short-sighted given the potential these shows had.
How does that play out with finance – these were already released shows and thus had a revenue tied with them (unlike the cancelled movies/shows before they were released)? I don’t see where the tax write-off is on this. I could see if they were pulling them to package up and license off to another streamer – that would just be more revenue for things they may or may not have been making any money from.
He’s disassembling his boat so he can have plywood to cling to.
Right. It’s not just that the shows could grow an audience in future seasons. It’s that a complete series keeps on paying for decades. Because it’s rewatchable. A show that’s cancelled halfway through its story, not so much. And most modern TV dramas have an overarching plotline, they’re serialized. By cancelling them based on first-season viewing figures, they are throwing away many millions of dollars down the line.
I think Westworld was uniquely vulnerable to being “disappeared” in a way that most of HBO’s back catalog is not.This is a show that (a) featured a lot of big name actors who could demand high residuals, (b) lost critical and popular acclaim with each season, (c) was cancelled without telling a complete story, and (d) ended in a deeply unsatisfying way that turned off everyone who stuck with the series until the bitter end.The complete series, as it stands, has no rewatch value, except they have to pay out higher-than-average residuals every time someone happens upon it. Nobody will cancel their HBO subscription because it’s been yanked.The Sopranos will never be yanked because it has a dedicated fan base that will revisit the series from time to time, it doesn’t pay out high residuals, and some number of subscribers will be upset if it ever disappears.
There’s no tax write off for these shows.
All these big companies they write off everything.
In theory, if some other company wants the streaming rights to westworld, discovery can get a nice paycheck for something that’s dead and not costing them anything. If nobody wants westworld on streaming, then discovery doesn’t lose anything. I think that’s the baffling idea. They don’t want to necessarily remove the content completely, they just want someone else to pay them to house it.
Most of these shows were co-productions. So presumably they had to pay bad robot something for Westworld or Mutant Enemy for The Nevers etc. All of the these choices are penny rich and pound foolish, as they help solve the crippling debt issues the company has in the short term, but will have long term reverberating consequences
Zsasz Zavlav must really think he doesn’t need Joss Whedon or Jonathan Nolan or J.J. Abrams.
My guess is there are some pretty awful early-streaming-days contracts and Discovery wants to get out of them without having a fire sale.
Could you imagine if Prime Video or Netflix picked up streaming rights for Westworld on the cheap and then knocked out a spectacular final season? We’ve seen that Prime’s not scared lavishing money on a show.
Only benefit would be not having to pay royalties. Unlike with shows you might see on network TV, they started with many established actors so they probably were able to negotiate larger residuals cuts.
And now it’s entirely PLEX-ing by me. In 4K no less. Avast, matey!
It makes perfect sense in the Insane Ultra-Super Genius Mind of Mr. Zsasz Zaslav!We’re too small-brained and simpleminded to comprehend the 12th-Dimensional Chess he’s playing as Discovery Warners’ CEO….
They still have to pay a fee to the production companies and possibly the actors, etc., just like network stations had to pay for syndication.The thing in stake, particularly for HBO, is that a show can get low ratings if it brings some positive coverage, and subscriptions. The Wire or Treme were shows that “nobody” watched, they didn’t win a lot of Emmy Awards, but they generated enough buzz for HBO to order additional seasons. These were shows that kept a small, but important, number of people subscribers to HBO because they did want to see all episodes as they aired, because they were “proud” in some way to have a subscription to the premium cable network that had the best shows on TV, even if they don’t watch them.A show such as Westworld started its life as a hit, both in ratings and buzz terms, then slowly slid into irrelevance, up to the point its presence on a streaming service may not get them any new subscribers. And I suppose that Warner must have precise stats on engagement rate, about the actual number of HBO Max subscribers who start watching, and keep watching, the show these days, which must be quite disappointing, as they don’t justify paying the fee to keep it in the catalog. It may be shopped to another streaming service for a couple of years, but it has probably outlived its usefulness at HBO Max.I’m not at all defending Zaslav, but some of it is the harsh reality of any business. The current team had inherited from ATT a production lineup that put emphasis on producing as many shows as possible, to gain market share against Netflix and the other services, regardless of the debt that was piling up. A corrective course was a necessity. The current management is doing this in an ham-fisted way, but when you’re $53bn into some fucking debt, sacrifices will be made.
Yeah I kept forgetting Westworld existed until they announced the new season starting, then I’d plan to catch up (I only saw season 1), then I’d immediately forget again. It’s interesting how some shows are just forgettable like that, even with interesting premises and a great cast.
i can understand canceling a show if under performing or it gets too expensive, but why remove it from your service entirely. i really don’t understand what they are doing.
I wonder if they determined selling/leasing the streaming rights to these shows to other platforms would be more profitable? It’s just such an odd decision
Can they sell these shows to another streamer like Netflix? Seems like the only thing that makes a lick of financial sense, but it’s still short-term. Having decades of content is a main draw for new subscribers, or to get people who only subscribed for, say, House of the Dragon to stick around.
“Can they sell these shows to another streamer like Netflix?”
Yep! And that’s exactly what they (and a number of other shortsighted content creators) were doing before deciding to make their own streaming services instead so that they could just absorb all of the profits! Forgetting about the “all of the costs, too!” part.
It’s a classic mistake.These companies see Netflix subscriber count and assume they will get close to that without realizing that by just being a thing they split the market. Add in the fact that many of these services(the good ones anyways) see a huge initial influx of subscribers and just assume that it will continuously grow. I think both HBO Max and Disney has fell for that one.
It’s so perfectly “cutting open the goose that lays the golden eggs” that it’s hard for me to come up with any other metaphor.
Given the existing content library. How many subscribers do you need to be profitable? That’s my question.
The problem isn’t being profitable. The problem with all major corporations(and capitalism in general) is that you always need to be MORE PROFITABLE. It doesn’t matter if you have a loyal fan base that supports you work and allows for a nice stable profit every quarter. That profit needs to go up, UP, UP!!!!! And if the boss says it has to go up 10% and it only goes up 9% then everyone shits themselves, stock owners panic and the “market” causes the stock to be devalued.
Exactly. The market is basically Twitch Plays Pokemon, and forces companies to chase stock price above everything else. And by stock price, I mean today’s, tomorrow’s, maybe next quarter’s; the market is wholly uninterested in short-term sacrifice for long-term gain.Plus, WBD is over $50b in debt. So cost cutting is going to be the clarion call within their walls. Super aggressive cost cutting, no matter the consequences.
As Nilus already said, it’s not that you have to be profitable to appease the stock market—it’s that you have to grow and keep growing. In any rational sense it’s insanity because any market is only so big and sooner or later you’re going to run out of customers, but that’s what Wall Street wants or else your stock tanks, so you find it harder to get loans and hire/retain executives and other people “important” enough to get stock options. Netflix’s stock tumbled so badly not because they lost any subscribers, but because their rate of getting more subscribers had decreased for one quarter and was projected to decrease for a second one. That’s all it took for Netflix to make changes like going after people who weren’t living in the same residence and demanding they get a second subscription, and offering an ad-supported tier which is already off to a rocky start. They might very well lose money with these strategies, but to the stock market the fact that they’re doing stuff means they’re taking steps to grow and thus “increase shareholder profits” (which is not a legal requirement no matter how many times Leo Laporte or other journalists claim otherwise!).Did you ever hear how often everybody said Microsoft was “stagnant” for years while Apple was the darling of Wall Street? It’s not because MSFT was in any danger of bankruptcy because they couldn’t pay their bills or people—it was because at that point in time their Windows OS was on 95% of personal computers, so their stock was worth roughly the same for years. It didn’t go up, it didn’t go down unless the DoJ got off its ass and investigated them for “monopolistic behavior” (which they were absolutely guilty of!)—it just was worth the same year in and year out, while Apple started growing in the late 1990s and has kept on growing, quarter after quarter. (Apple was also coming from near-bankruptcy themselves by the mid-1990s when they hired Steve Jobs back, so they had a lot further to go to catch up.) For MSFT’s part, they’ve turned that around by selecting Satya Nadella as their CEO, and he’s done a lot to change the corporate culture and made some smart steps to lessen the company’s dependence on Windows and Office running on PCs as their main source of income.Having said all that, I await the brickbats from people who’ve actually played the stock market (I haven’t, and Gods willing will never have to) and can explain the issue far more accurately than I. This is simply my outsider’s opinion based on my love of technology and listening to people talk about Microsoft compared to Apple and looking up things that sounded hinky to me, like “companies must legally increase shareholder value”!
You nailed it. There are too many streamers and people cannot afford twenty services. Everyone had dreams of being the one on top and now the fun ended and the hangover is here. They all thought about the revenue and not at all about the cost of having their own platforms.
Tax breaks?
Depending on contracts HBO/Warner may have to pay people every time their shows is played on a streamer. It’s probably pennies but this new guy seems like a real cheap asshole
The Warner Bros Discovery business plan was written by the underpants gnomes:1. Cancel all entertaining content.2. ?3. Profit!
The thing is, unless a given show is literally the reason why a subscriber doesn’t cancel, it’s not generating any revenue and paying those residuals is a complete waste of money. I was thinking of re-watching Westworld with my son because he’s never seen it, so this is disappointing to me. But HBO max has enough other content that I’m not going to cancel my subscription. So for Warner, it’s the right decision. Their goal should be offering the absolute bare minimum that keeps people subscribing. It absolutely sucks, but that’s capitalism.
So… another reason to not cut the cord… ffs
Does HBO Max also have a CEO of Tits?(Cleary not)
He was downsized to CEO of Side Boob.
Replaced by Discovery’s CEO of iPhones Wedged In Bras Of 90 Day Fiancées
He’s been reassigned—now he’s the VP of Amateur Porn Boob.
Love Life was pretty solid, the second season was a really fun watch thanks to William Jackson Harper (who is an absolute star with range that needs as many projects as possible based on that show, The Good Place, and The Resort). Was hoping for a third season but at least the seasons that came out were self-contained and the stories were done.Westworld is crazy to me. It’s not even a HBO Max original, it’s a HBO show that predated Max. Maybe the thought process is new viewers are unlikely to pick it up since they decided to leave it incomplete. But seems dumb.
“Westworld, meanwhile, was unjustly canceled a few months after airing its fourth season—which ended on a clear setup for a final season that will now never happen.”Unjustly? The show had been running on fumes since season 2. And almost nobody was watching.Now, if they pulled a Deadwood and made everybody think a S5 was nearly guaranteed, then I can understand “unjustly”.It cost a lot of money to make and ratings were dismal.
As evidently the only person on earth who really enjoyed The Nevers, I’m pretty disappointed, but I am slightly heartened that there’s at least a chance it will get to be seen *somewhere*.
Honestly I was waiting for the entire season 1 to come out before watching. Guess it’ll never happen now.
I enjoyed it too and was looking forward to more… sigh.
I’m hoping Netflix picks up The Nevers since they would have the money to produce a season or two more.
I was fool enough to hope for a second season!
My family and I have been waiting impatiently for the rest of season 1.
At least Roku saved Chad season 2.
https://ew.com/tv/chad-season-2-roku-nasim-pedrad/
Real life is 30 Rock now, I fucking swear God Cop is hitting HBO Max next june
A full season of God Cop was filmed, but for tax purposes it will never air.
Coming to Discovery and HBO Max… Gold Case!
They’re basically running with the MILF show.
Chad is so good.
Disclaimer before I make the following statement: I am not American and therefore not weirdly hand-wringy about a certain word I am about to useThe statement itself: David Zaslav is a massive, MASSIVE cunt.
I’d agree with you but at least cunts are useful, Zaslav is more like an appendix or something else completely useless.
It’s like if the head of Disney literally collected the six Infinity Stones and used them to wipe out half of all Marvel movies as a tax write-off.Okay. I’ve shat on Barsanti’s writing several times over the years, but I gotta say, that was a pretty clever line. Hats off, Sam.Also, a bit of a confession: Everyone seems to shit on HBOMax, in general, but it is probably my favorite streaming service just in terms of overall content (they have Adult Swim’s old catalog nd a bunch of classic movies to go along with HBO originals), so watching this fuckwit Zaslav repeatedly take a hatchet to it really does suck.Also also, less than two hours after this post goes up there are 35 replies… it’s like the AVC of old!
I see more people shitting on Zaslav than HBO Max and lamenting how it’s going to lose everything that made it good. It’s the service I find I want to watch the most things on, for about the same reasons as you. 🙁
Yeah I really enjoy HBO Max overall of the streaming services I have, or pay for, I was really mad the cancelled Westworld as I was really liking it, even watched the entire series a second time. It just seems like a series of shit decisions. Cancelling Minx’s second season after it was more or less fully finished seems dumb.
I was pretty bummed they cancelled Los Espookys, but it had an okay run. If they take it off the service and lock it in a vault though, I’m going to be pissed.
That’s whats odd about all this. Like Minx had just finished production on season 2, why NOT put it up. And with Westworld is just finished it’s run earlier this year, to just pull it entirely is strange. It’s not like some show that finished it’s run a decade ago, or that they are like we are removing x but giving you y.
HBO Max has been great. What the new guy who only knows reality shows is doing is not great.
HBOMax has fantastic content, but the user interface does kind of suck. So basically, they are getting rid of the good half.
Yeah, I have to admit, HBOMAX is/was great. (I feel like your the first person to admit that out loud!) Their originals all felt like they had the same handpicked quality level of HBO proper. I was a subscriber back when it was an Amazon “channel”. Then they cut that off, making it harder to access. I mean, I don’t understand why they tried to make it distinct from HBO in the first place, and then they cut it off at the knees by making it hard/annoying to access, and now it’s just slowly torturing the remaining remnants. Not one fucking decision here has made sense and it’s really an honest to god shame.
HBO max is going to turn into thanos dust sometime next year for whatever abomination their new app is called. Warner media is being too quiet on the reasoning for all the content leaving making everyone speculate and fear for the worst. It could just be renegotation of contracts now that Warner/ discovery is an entirely new company or just a process of migration to the new app but their lips are sealed. I hope the new app is as good or better than the old one but the way things are going it looks to all be a shit show.
HBO max was great before ATT bought warner and it has been great through ATT ownership up until they wanted to combine discovery in the mix in april 2022 and make it a “new company.” Now the new management is stupid and are trying to maximize profits by making multiple teirs of membership, a free plan with ads and removing tons of good content from the platform. Up until June I would have told people if i could only afford to pay for one streaming service it would for sure be hbo max. Now i’m not so sure.
Tubi is a solid choice, and it’s free. Lotta gems.
Agreed, I use my Roku search and save to make a list of movies I want to watch. I’ll check it once in a while and see something is available on Crackle, Roku, Tubi or Vudu.
HBO Max is still a great service. But Zaslav’s idea of quality programming is “reality” home repair shows, so how much longer is it going to be great? Particularly since now Zaslav isn’t just against creating new content, he’s eager to remove content that’s already there. You get the feeling that the service could wind up looking pretty threadbare as existing deals expire and are replaced by by more Discovery-type crap.
HBO MAX has the extended versions of the LOTR movies. This is reason enough to keep it for me.
‘”HBO MAX has the extended versions of the LOTR movies. This is reason enough to keep it for me.”’For now, don’t think he won’t get rid of those too.
It’d be cheaper to buy the UHD Blu-rays.
Content-wise, HBOMax is the best streamer. The only arguable competition is Netflix for its international stuff. I don’t know anyone who has ever shit on HBOMax for its content. It’s interface is not great.
Pre-Zaslav, my biggest gripes with HBOMax were its terrible interface. It was never the content I had issue with, it was the fact that it was really rough to navigate, especially when trying to log in on a new device. But now, jeez, it’s just a shit show.
Yea, I like it too. It has Martin and Living Single, but also had Young Justice. IDK why that was cancelled again.. sigh
I love HBO Max. It’s probably my favorite streamer, the amount of content is pretty stellar. I love animation, comics, and old movies, so the CN, DC, and TCM catalogue are wonderful (actualy HBO content is pretty nifty too). That’s why it’s such a bummer the streamer is get shaved down for an increase in price.
Pre-Zaslav, were that many people really shitting on HBO Max’s content? I always thought it was fantastic – all the great HBO series, Studio Ghibli movies, the TCM hub where you could find plenty of classic and foreign films (including a good number of Criterion Collection titles), Adult Swim stuff, South Park, etc. Personally, it has a lot of stuff tailored to my TV and film interests, and I’ll hate to see it stripped bare over time.
This is wild. I’m not sure if going full nuclear is the right path. Oh well, I don’t pay for it anyways so I’m just here to watch everything burn.
DANGIT!!!
Despite the Joss Whedon of it all, the overall creative team for The Nevers was shaping it up to be something special.
Yep. Not happy.
Was Zaslav brought on to just destroy everything from the inside? He started by canceling everything that was in progress or unrealeased and now he’s removing things that were already done. Who’s going to sign up for a streaming service that doesn’t have anything on it?
This won’t make any sense to anybody who wasn’t alive in the 1980s, but I suspect Zaslav is the reincarnation of Fred Silverman, and this is his NBC….
Banshees of Inisherin tomorrow, and Friday Black Adam. Then I’m flipping the switch and cancelling Max. I’m especially steamed about Minx. That was a solid little show with a great vibe, and it deserved better.
When Saslav is done HBOMax will be the Chip and Joanna Gaines network and we’ll have nothing but fucking shiplap and cooking shows
HBO Max to reboot Luck and John from Cincinnati because HBO Max is cray cray to the max.
And Arli$$. There were so many unanswered questions at the end of Season 7.
This sucks. Westworld will still be for sale on Amazon and other pay-TV sites, but you can no longer get into it via a streaming subscription. All to save them, what, a few millions at most in residuals?
Zaslav is reminding me more and more of the 80s guy from ‘Futurama’ who didn’t know Planet Express was a delivery company before he bought it.
Will he get boneitus for his greed? One can only hope!
Don’t you worry about HBO Max, let me worry about blank.
*Zaslav hums the “Safety Dance” before laughing in a sinister tone*
“Don’t you worry about blank. Let me worry about blank.”
I remember someone on the Sopranos saying they did a take on everything they shot with no swearwords in the event the show ever went into syndication. Sure, syndication is largely gone now, but maybe they’re going to sell the rights for Westworld to TBS…? So they can say “Westworld … now EXCLUSIVELY on TBS (or TNT or Roku or whatever). That’s the only upside I can see with this.
Westworld would have to be completely reshot to be safe for TBS.
Edits, blurring, say it’s TV-MA but cut for TV-14 like AMC.
I have to assume that the reason for taking these off of streaming is to sell them to other streaming services, right? It’s not savings, but potential revenue streams on top of very minor savings.But West World is probably a flagship for HBO, on it’s own streaming service. I imagine these removals on top of the previous ones are leading to a shut down or complete redirect of HBO Max? What’s going to be left there?
“Zaslav, who seems to actively hate movies and TV shows”I mean, there’s literally no other logical explanation. It’s quite literally unbelievably how fucking terrible the Discovery takeover has been.
More like the dude either decided/was tricked into acquiring a company with a shit load of debt and is now stripping the copper wire to desperately pay it back other wise he doesn’t get his 9 figure bonus.
I apologize for the typo and for using the word literally twice in a row.
Wow, lol. Happy holidays?
So… these violent delights have violent ends was really the tagline of HBO Max? That makes more sense then Westworld ultimately did.
“Westworld, meanwhile, was unjustly canceled a few months after airing its fourth season”
No. Say what you will about the baffling decision to pull the finished shows off of the streaming service, but cancelling Westworld was an entirely justified decision, give that it was very bad and its audience had cratered.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they started shopping stuff like Westworld to other streamers or networks to see if it’s more valuable to rent out.
I’ll ask this again since nobody has given me an answer yet.Maybe there is no answer.Why go through all the trouble of buying the big prestige media conglomerate with its known properties and weaknesses (high debt being the primary one they’re focused on) only to gut the entire thing that you are buying? It’s like if you bought Facebook and said, “I figured out that all this moderation and everything with the users is what’s costing so much money, so we’re taking out the part where people can post.” or buying Oreo and saying, “yeah, we think the creme part is really holding us back, so we’re getting rid of it.”What’s Discovery getting out of this other than a lot of bad press and bad faith?
“Westworld, meanwhile, was unjustly canceled a few months after airing its fourth season”How did its massive drop in viewership, along with its top-of-the-line production expenses, not deserve cancellation? I watched the first three seasons, but didn’t anticipate bothering with the fourth unless the reviews were ecstatic, which they weren’t.
I’m cancelling this as soon a my GF finishes Dragon. They add only bargain bin shit besides it lately.
Jesus – I wanted to get around to watching Love Life at some point (I love me some Ana Kendrick – and Chidi! C’mon!) – and I might have made it to later seasons of Westworld eventually. Like, I’m fine with canceling – but this removing shit has got to stop.
where was the FTC for this merger?
I’m still very, very pissed that the Harley Quin animated show isn’t on HBO Max in the Netherlands, and I haven’t found any news about if and when it will be.
Why though? None of this makes any sense. What are they replacing them with?
How do you feel about REAL STREETWALKERS OF DULUTH?
How soon before we hear the news that James Gunn has left as creative head of DCEU because Zaslav decreed that no DC movie cost more than $25M? Before Xmas? Hell, it wouldn’t surprise me if WBD is actively looking for a buyer or buyers for all of DC. (Amazon? Sony? The Asylum?)
I think DC is the one thing they won’t sell. Wouldn’t be surprised for them to spin off HBO or even all of WB sans DC and sell it off to Apple or something
One of my favorite bits of comic book industry lore is how back in the late 80s Warner came within an eyeblink of selling off DC comics to Marvel, and it only didn’t happen because Marvel/Cadence got scared of (I am not making this up) antitrust issues.I’m sure that if they wanted to put the DC franchise on the auction block, Disney would love to correct that mistake.
Man, that’s almost as bad as Marvel bidding some character rights away in the 90s.
He likes reality shows, so is he gearing up a low-rent “Survivor” with blur-free tits and dicks? Be careful what you wish for….
Naked and Afraid, no blurs?
There’s no fucking way we’re getting that Venture Bros. movie, is there?
Sexy heist? Sexy heist!? Sexy heist!
Well, Zaslav IS Russian. Like similar famous Russians, he’s just randomly raining down destruction on the livelihoods of the creators and actors of these shows, for reasons known only to him. I’m personally hoping for a coup to bring an end to his reign…
Zaslav isn’t Russian, his parents were Ukrainian Jews. Don’t mean to split hairs but these days that distinction is quite important.
Ahhh. You dug deeper than my quick surname origin search. Joke just falls apart now, lol.
Youch!Yep, you got that right….
Candide then asked what was that fine series which had been killed with so much ceremony. They answered, it was Westworld.
“And why kill Westworld?”“On this streamer it is found good, from time to time, to kill one original series to encourage the others.”
The whole point of a streaming service is your vast content library. When you consciously cull your library down you’re undermining the entire business strategy. HBO is my favorite streamer. They seem to be actively trying to ruin it.
In the early days of streaming NETFLIX owned it all. The newcomers had to pay to keep content as they built their own platforms. It MAY be that there are some pretty terrible deals to have exclusive streaming rights and HBO is shelving rather than releasing the content from their original deals. That would make the most sense to me. But it still undermines their strategy. This entire fiasco reminds me of when Avon bought Tiffany. Door-to-door cheap cosmetics and jewelry takes over five star boutique. Shark week is trying to run The Wire. Hard pass.
Dang! I just started watching S3 of Westworld. I better hustle and focus on watching the last 2 seasons.
This shouldn’t be allowed unless they are releasing these shows on physical media somehow. This is just asking people to pirate your show.
Westworld is on physical media (one of the few TV shows I’ve seen released on 4K Blu Ray actually). I dunno about Love Life and The Nevers though.
yeah some shows still get a dvd/blu ray release, but Alena Smith, who created Dickinson, tweeted that even she doesn’t have a DVD set of her own show. I’m sure she could get one if she really wanted, but if Apple ever drops that show, the rest of us are out of luck, and I’m sure the same could be said for a lot of other shows. It’s why I refuse to buy any digital media, you’re not actually buying the movie/show, you’re buying a license to watch that movie/show, as long as they say it’s available.
The writing’s been on the wall for months. For the past month, I’ve been watching HBOMax near exclusively, to wrap things up before I cancel it.
Love Life was great, fuck you Discovery.
normally i would suggest Netflix scoop up HBO Max discardings but in these 3 cases I’m really not sure its worthwhile – feels like Westworld’s best days were way back and the Nevers just seems way too expensive, especially when netflix could just take another shot at their own version of 19th century super-hero team, w/o the Nevers baggage.
What happens to these shows? Do they move to AMC+? That seems silly. Do they shop them around to other streamers like Netflix and Prime? Do they just become unavailable?
Westworld, meanwhile, was unjustly canceled a few months after airing its fourth seasonI’m one of the (apparently few) people that enjoyed Westworld until the end and I think it’s mindboggling that because it’s a “real” HBO show it’s too expensive to keep on HBO Max, but… come the fuck on. It was an expensive af show that was hemorrhaging viewers. Can we stop with this idea that a cancellation is “unjust” because the writers left a cliffhanger at the end?
My friends love to make fun of me for my blu-ray collection. Its not huge by any means its just everything I really like. And this is why. I can pull it up at anytime and not have to pay a service for it. Or as in the case of WW not being able to find it anywhere.
You need new, better friends.
I get the angle of saving a buck, but even that doesn’t add up.
A show like Westworld isn’t confined to just streaming, it’s also on bluray and DVD, where the royalty payouts are far higher than what anyone is making off streaming views.
Since Zas took over it’s really felt like he’s got some kind of blood feud with HBO and is hell bent on just destroying the brand out of spite…and everything he’s done since just adds fuel to that theory.
Westworld, meanwhile, was unjustly canceled a few months after airing its fourth seasonNo, very justly. There’s never been a show that was in clearer need of cancellation based on the money that is obviously being spent to make it.
Pardon me, but did WESTWORLD kill your dog?That’s the only reason I can figure for your irrational hatred of a streaming series.
They’re making room for all their reality shows.
Are all of these shows licensed? And are the fees that much? I do not understand how this results in any savings. This isn’t a Batgirl situation where they can right off production costs.
I’ll ask the $64 million question: if Warner Bros destroys everything HBO has to offer, why would anyone be dumb enough to sign up for the service?
I assume residuals are paid on a per-stream basis, not just because the thing is sitting on a server, right? Assuming that’s true, if your only expense is residuals, you’re incurring it because people actually want to watch the content. And if you remove content people want to watch, then you’ll lose those subscribers. This doesn’t seem hard to figure.
HBO was the first streaming service I signed up for and now they are removing so much of the content I like and raising the price? I fear it’s going to become the “white shiplap” channel. I’m probably reaching the end of the road with them.
Restaurants start getting bad after a chain grows beyond, like, 3 locations, because (among other things) at that point they start hiring accountants and the accountants start demanding that the wagyu sliders get cut for not being cost-effective even though those’re the popular dish that made them big in the first place.But that shit can fly, because food is a utilitarian thing and most people just want it to be innocuous…. This, though, is art. If you just fuck with things like it’s all reds and blacks on spreadsheets, you’re eventually just going to remove what makes it a special thing that people would tune into. I HAVE to eat. I DON’T have to pay a subscription fee for a castrated HBO streaming service. I have a backlog of 600 steam games to play thru.
Who absorbs Warner Bros. Discovery? My money is on Amazon but I could see Weyland-Yutani swooping in last second.
I hate how everything in our pop culture landscape is being devoured by a couple of corporations but at this point I would welcome Disney or Apple or anyone buying them to get this fucko out of the driver’s seat
What is with this fucking guy? Jesus.
I won’t miss any of those shows, and I’m sure neither will most of you.
I’m just sitting here trying to think of a reason I’d even keep whatever they end up branding HBO Max in the future. I honestly can’t think of a single one- The Nevers, Westworld, Raised By Wolves- all gone. I will miss Jon Oliver but the best parts are always available free as clips. One day I want a job that entails taking something that was great and making it shitty.
“see hbo max was bad, look at all the subscriber loss” “sir, that happened After you got rid of everything people liked” “your fired”
Go back in time and kill Hitler stop the WB/Discovery merger.
Go back further and stop the WB sale to AT&T.
Just wait next year he’ll pull Game of Thrones.
Counterpoint: Anna Kendrick is famous for things that all came out a decade ago. If this was 1982, she’d be on the Love Boat.
Remember when people who were concerned about gaming’s pivot to an all-digital model were met with mockery?This shit right here is what we were concerned about.
It’s like if the head of Disney literally collected the six Infinity
Stones and used them to wipe out half of all Marvel movies as a tax
write-off.
You write this in jest, but I’m pretty sure this is what happened to Song of the South.
Ah, yes, The Nevers…“The first half aired early last year, and the second half was supposed to air at some point next year.”Well, they need to hurry (tf) up!
Reasons like this are why I still have a Netflix DVD subscription. My queue has 150 things in it that I can’t stream anywhere (well, without adding even more streaming services!).As for HBO Max specifically, I paid for a 1-year sub upfront last year. It comes up for renewal on the 22nd of this month. I guess I’ll hate-watch Westworld S4 just to finish it.Or I can just add it to my DVD queue, I guess…
It’s a flop. As is a few other thing they have on now.
So they will can it. And some other junk they have on.So they can put a new flop on. I have HBO/MAX. But it may betime to can it! HBO/MAX has become a big flop.
I look forward to the book, or lawsuit filing, that will be written about this next-level bullshit Hollywood Accounting.
I feel bad for the actors and other talent involved who bank on residuals. Likely not a ton for HBO/Discovery’s bottom line, but it can make or break a working actor.
What assholes.
I predict that if this kind of thing continues (or maybe even if it doesn’t), SAG and the various writer and director guilds are going to get involved and make it more costly for streamers up-front. They’ll have to get their members more money up-front if residuals are effectively going away. This is going to amount to a short-term gain in exchange for longer-term losses for these platforms.
Assholes.
How does it save them money to actually remove these things from view? I’m really asking.
It saves them from paying royalties.
Oh, I see. Yeah, that makes sense.
I’m no fan of Zaslav but at this point, I think WB might be in much worse shape than we realize. They have $47 billion in debt. Their stock price dropped 50% since WBD spun off from AT&T. Their debt is now almost twice their market cap. The interest alone on that debt has to be massive. And with interest rates going up, it’s probably getting costlier to service that debt and it’s harder to borrow.
Most of that debt was incurred in the buyout. So, it should have been a known quantity before the purchase was made.
Yeah, but I bet they didn’t know their stock price was going to tank 50% in less than a year when they made the buyout.
Which might not have happened if they hadn’t hired the former CEO of Discovery Networks, who turned that into a dumpster fire of shit Reality TeeVee, to head up WB/Discovery.
I want my slop! fill up the trough goddammit!
There would seem to be some value in funding a short season or a movie to wrap up a series like Westworld. Wouldn’t that increase the value of future syndication and streaming by giving viewers assurance that the series wrapped up?
This is getting legitimately depressing. Zaslav’s laying waste to everything, there’s nothing anyone can do about it, streaming as a whole is running towards “fewer things available, with more ads”, it’s just sad really. And like, yeah, they have a lot of debt- and this is not going to make the tiniest dent in it. It’s counting pens. The best they can probably hope for is someone buying them out and, well, that’s not good.
Love Life is great and is available on both BBC IPlayer and Netflix in the UK.
Zaslav is one of those guys that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.Yet he hired James Gunn to straighten out the DCU which I think is a good decision?I guess we’ll see how much micromanagement and interference happens, maybe the other co-chair can run interference.
Gosh, I love Capitalism.