HBO Max Is Making an Offer You Can’t Refuse
The streaming service hopes that their exclusive access to anticipated movies and beloved shows will make HBO Max a must-have subscription in 2021. Ranker poll results suggest they might be onto something.
A still from the upcoming Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark. Photo: IMDB
Earlier this month, AT&T announced that Warner Bros. entire slate of 2021 movies would stream exclusively on Time-Warner’s new streaming service, HBO Max. The decision shocked the entertainment industry, but for those who have watched HBO Max since it first arrived onto the streaming scene, it’s just the latest development in a very familiar strategy for winning over the hearts, minds, and subscription dollars of consumers everywhere.
Warner Brothers isn’t making any friends in Hollywood with their decision to ditch the box office and air movies like Dune and The Matrix 4 through HBO Max. Some artists like Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan have already begun to voice their frustration with the film distributor publicly. But behind this controversial idea that could potentially transform the movie industry is a very simple logic: in a world made uncertain by the COVID-19 pandemic, the only thing you can truly count on is that people will be streaming at home.
If you buy it, they will come.
Photo: HBO Max
HBO Max made big waves when it launched earlier this year by purchasing the streaming rights to Friends, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and later, South Park. By claiming a wide range of immensely popular shows, HBO Max bet that Americans would come to see a subscription to their service as an outright necessity.
Shows like The Big Bang Theory come at a heavy price for HBO, but they’re key to building and maintaining a subscription base. A single popular show can make a lifetime of difference for OTT streamers — earlier this year, one study found that more than 30% of Netflix’s subscribers use the service to watch The Office. Moreover, Quibi proved that new content isn’t enough to convince people to fork over their money once a month, no matter how many big names are behind it. HBO Max is instead pairing new shows like The Undoing and The Flight Attendant with series that its potential customers can’t go without, a strategy that is already paying off.
Warner Brothers’ are hoping to achieve something similar in moving their 2021 movies to the streaming service. The company’s slate for next year features enough anticipated movies (including a Sherlock Holmes sequel and a reboot of Suicide Squad) to attract the interest of even the most casual movie fans. Instead of winning the business of these viewers just once to watch a movie like Mortal Kombat in theaters, they could win it again and again at the end of each month.
What’s more, HBO Max could be a rising tide that lifts all Warner Bros.’ boats. Those who subscribe to the service to watch Space Jam 2 could end up using it to watch movies they might not have paid to see in theaters, like In the Heights or The Many Saints of Newark. The end result could be wider audiences for these movies and enough subscriptions to rival giants like Netflix and Amazon Prime.
HBO has what viewers want
Of course, none of this will really work for HBO Max if people don’t actually need the content it’s streaming as badly as the service imagines they do. But a cursory glance at some of Ranker’s movie and TV surveys suggests that HBO’s strategy is right on the money.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Ranker’s list of the Most Anticipated Movies of 2021 has already amassed 32,600 votes — of the Top 10 movies on the list, five are being produced by Warner Bros. Given that half of the movies people are excited to watch next year will be the exclusive purview of HBO Max, it’s hard to imagine a world in which the streaming service doesn’t pick up millions and millions of movie fans in the coming months.
