HBO Max Is Focused On Winning Weekends, And Its Big Budget Feature Film Slate Is Leading The Way

With consumers ready to get out of their living rooms this summer and top streamer Netflix’s growth already slowing considerably, you could imagine WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar tamping expectations for the company’s nearly year-old HBO Max.

Well, he’s not doing that.

“I think that the ceiling [for streaming] is much higher than people are talking about today,” Kilar said last week in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “If you look at the number of people that are on the planet and the fact that everyone loves to be moved through story, I think the ceiling is a lot higher than several hundred million paying subscribers.”

That optimism is due to several factors converging in WarnerMedia and HBO Max’s favor:

• HBO Max’s app is on every major TV platform and gives WarnerMedia tons of data to fine-tune its user experience and customize its recommendations.
• Streaming works best at a global scale, and HBO Max will add 60 markets this year.
• HBO Max looks to win a lot of weekends in 2021 with franchise movies like Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Suicide Squad, Dune, and The Matrix 4.
• HBO Max is developing a lot of event programming outside of feature films, including the recently-taped Friends reunion special, several series spinoffs of film franchises, and — as WarnerMedia and the NHL announced earlier today — pro hockey.
• A cheaper, ad-supported tier of HBO Max will launch in June.

Kilar’s plan to boost HBO Max subscribers with blockbuster movies is working. A WarnerMedia exec told me this week that DC’s Wonder Woman 1984, monster mash-up Godzilla vs. Kong, and video-game adaptation Mortal Kombat — all big, expensive, franchise films — have been the three biggest opening-weekend movies since HBO Max launched nearly a year ago. (Sorry to those who spent the last three-plus years clamoring for #TheSnyderCut.)

HBO and HBO Max have grown from a combined 33.1 million to 44.2 million U.S. subscribers over the last year. In March, the company raised its forecast for HBO Max from 75-90 million to 120-150 million global subscribers by the end of 2025.

HBO Max Put the Fundamentals First

When HBO Max launched in May 2020, things were a bit of a mess.

On the marketing front, HBO Max had a difficult job explaining that it was neither HBO Now (for direct-to-consumer subscribers) nor HBO Go (for cable subscribers). On the consumer front, HBO Max was not available at launch on the 70% of U.S. connected TVs that ran on Roku or Amazon’s Fire TV. On the executive front, WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar had been at the company for only two months.

A year later, HBO Max is in a very different place.

The marketing has fully shifted from what HBO Max is to what HBO Max is streaming this week, and WarnerMedia reached carriage deals with Roku and Amazon that have given the streamer a self-contained experience on every platform rather than an aggregated experience that HBO subscribers had formerly gotten on Amazon’s Fire TV, Apple’s TV app, or cable VOD services.

As with Netflix and Disney+, HBO Max’s end-to-end control of the user experience on every platform has given WarnerMedia a trove of data about what subscribers watch, whether they finish watching it, what they watch next, what devices they watch on, etc., that will help evolve the streamer’s interface and inform its programming decisions.

HBO Max Will Soon Go Global

Streaming reached 1.1 billion paid subscriptions worldwide in 2020, and global investment in blockbuster titles, content catalogs, and better tech is already powering enormous economies of scale for Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, and Apple TV+.

HBO Max, which has spent its first year as a U.S.-only streamer, has announced plans to expand to 39 Latin American markets in June and then to 21 European markets by the end of 2021. HBO has been in Latin America for years and has a big catalog of Spanish-language titles, and HBO Max has ordered additional originals from Mexico, Brazil and Argentina for the Latin American launch.

Foreign-language titles are finding a global audience. Netflix’s French heist series Lupin was the streamer’s No. 1 title globally in the first quarter of 2021 with 76 million households sampling the series, and Mexican drama Who Killed Sara? spent 16 days in April as Netflix’s most-watched title globally according to streaming tracker FlixPatrol.

HBO Max has dedicated tabs for “International” and “Latino” content in its main left-side menu, and several foreign-language Max Originals — Italian crime drama Gomorrah, Swedish hockey drama Beartown, and Spanish romcom Foodie Love — have generated significant coverage on U.S. entertainment outlets like Decider, Vulture and The Ringer.

Streaming Strategy: Win the Weekend

Shiny objects attract subscribers, and great catalogs keep them. In March, Disney+ reached 100 million global subscribers only 16 months after launch on the strength of the Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar franchises and blockbuster releases like The Mandalorian and WandaVision.

WarnerMedia’s entry in the shiny-object sweepstakes has been a shock-and-awe film slate — starting with Wonder Woman 1984 on Christmas day and including all 17 films on its 2021 theatrical slate — that will have HBO Max in the conversation roughly every third weekend for the rest of this year.

Winning the weekend with big movies has become increasingly important for streamers, and HBO Max will drive massive social-media traffic and entertainment coverage with cartoon/basketball mash-up Space Jam: A New Legacy (July 16), DC team-up The Suicide Squad (August 16), and fantasy franchisers Dune (October 1) and The Matrix 4 (December 22).

HBO Max is also developing franchise noisemakers on the series side with Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon, The Suicide Squad spinoff Peacemaker, Sex and the City spinoff And Just Like That…., and an untitled The Batman spinoff all angling for 2022 releases.

Cheaper HBO Max Will Have a Wider Reach

Cheaper, ad-supported tiers have expanded Hulu and Paramount+ to more price-conscious households, and HBO Max — one of the pricier U.S. streamers at $14.99 a month — plans to introduce a cheaper ad-supported tier in the United States in June. HBO Max’s new price plan will make the service cheaper than Netflix and the Disney/Hulu bundle, which are both currently $13.99 a month.

And — since it’s not TV; it’s HBO — WarnerMedia’s Kilar has said that HBO originals will not include ads.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider. He is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast and a podcast producer for Starburns Audio. Follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.

Watch Mortal Kombat on HBO Max