Dec 10, 2021 9:00 AM

HBO Max Might Have Outsmarted the Streaming Wars

The play to put all Warner Bros. theatrical movies on the service in 2021 was a big gamble. It paid off.

Actresses Kristin Davis Cynthia Nixon and Sarah Jessica Parker sitting around a dining table on the set of the Sex...

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Almost exactly one year ago, Warner Bros. made a rather startling announcement: In 2021, all of the movies on its slate would be released on HBO Max the same day they hit theaters. Suicide Squad, Godzilla vs. Kong, Dune, The Matrix Resurrections—all of them. Cinephiles all but revolted. Dune director Denis Villeneuve published a letter in Variety calling HBO Max’s launch a “failure” and the decision by Warner Bros. parent company AT&T to “sacrifice” the 2021 lineup to the streaming service “a desperate attempt to grab the audience’s attention.” In many ways, Villenueve was right—it was a move intended to boost subscriber numbers in a market slowly becoming saturated with streaming services. But also, it worked.

Back when the company first announced the day-and-date HBO Max movie plan—internally code-named Project Popcorn—HBO and HBO Max had about 61 million subscribers worldwide. Today, that number is closer to 70 million. (For context, Netflix has somewhere near 214 million subscribers, while a smaller cable network like Starz has around 30 million.) Meanwhile, the streaming service has bolstered up a certain level of cool by being the destination for original programming like Hacks, HBO’s critical juggernaut Succession, and this week’s Sex and the City spinoff And Just Like That … “All things considered, HBO Max has had a good year,” says Sarah Henschel, principal analyst in media and entertainment at Omdia. “Their strategy to release blockbuster films like Dune directly day-and-date on HBO Max has kept the service relevant throughout 2021.”

In other words, HBO Max may have found a way to hack the streaming wars. Subscriber growth is stagnating across streaming services, but HBO Max has been able to slowly, strategically gain a toehold in a business that, when the service first launched, didn’t look like it had much room for new players—and has only gotten more since then. (Hello, Peacock! Welcome, Paramount+!) And it's serious about holding on to the position it's achieved. One of the reasons for the service’s lackluster subscriber numbers in the third quarter of this year was because HBO Max parted ways with Amazon Prime Video to prioritize direct subscriptions to the service rather than those that come through Amazon. “While this might slow growth in the short term this quarter,” Henschel notes, “it is strategic for growing revenues in the long term.” She also points to HBO Max’s ad-supported tier, which costs $10 as opposed to the standard $15, as a way to broaden its appeal in the crowded market.

Make no mistake, this was all a bit of a gamble. Putting millions of dollars worth of marquee films on a streaming service in the hopes that they would attract, and retain, a few million subscribers is a big bet. It could have easily failed. It also is the kind of play that could maybe only have worked during a pandemic. Many folks are still leery of theaters, and HBO Max provided a good alternative for those who still wanted to watch big blockbusters. It also helped Warner Bros., which had a few movies ready to go and sitting idle but was not necessarily able to produce more at its usual volume. “It was great for the service, especially during a time where schedules were not fully populated because of Covid-related production delays,” HBO chief content officer Casey Bloys recently told Vulture. “It was just a great steady source of movies that people loved.”

Things in 2022, however, might look much different. Omicron, or whatever Covid-19 variant comes after it, might still be lingering when next summer’s big movie season starts, but chances are people will be much less reliant on streaming. So what will become of HBO Max then? Well, for one, its parent company, AT&T, is spinning off WarnerMedia to merge it with Discovery. It’s still unclear what the result will be, but it’s hard not to imagine some combination of HBO Max and Discovery’s properties—HGTV, Oprah Winfrey’s OWN, Animal Planet, etc.—will ensue.

HBO Max is also planning lots of new original series, like the Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon. The company is also trying something new (again) when it comes to its film slate: Next year, Warner Bros. movies will go back to being released exclusively in theaters, but they will be available on HBO Max 45 days later—a much shorter time window than the eight months HBO previously needed to wait before airing a new release. “That’s huge,” Bloys told Vulture. “I believe it’s going to work really well because people who want to go to theaters and experience a movie theatrically get to do that—and then 45 days later, it’s on Max. That, to me, seems like a really great situation. We’ll see how it goes.” Guess we all will.