What HBO and Max Want to Buy Now (and Why Agents Complain)
Part VI in our Fall Market Guide
Elaine covers the TV market from L.A. and just won best online columnist in the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards. She recently revealed the fallout from a massive cache of scripts used to train AI. Today she resumes looking at what every studio and streamer wants to buy now and how to pitch them, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, NBCU and Peacock, Disney brands ABC, Disney+, Hulu and FX and Apple TV+.
Happy Monday after Turkey Day, Series Business readers — although I think last week’s newsletter on Big Tech training AI on 139,000 TV and film scripts may have given a lot of you indigestion.
So let’s get back into the world of development. We are just a few weeks away from the town shutting down for the holidays, but there’s still time to set a couple more meetings at San Vicente Bungalows or wherever you power lunch these days. (Are we still even doing that?!)
This week: the WBD headliners. HBO has long been known as the crown jewel of Warner Bros. But its status as the shiny center of the prestige TV universe has been tarnished in recent years, as its current (Discovery) and previous (AT&T) corporate overlord sought to achieve scale on the back of HBO. Its standing has also been threatened with serious competition, from Netflix’s prestige offerings to Apple TV+’s so-called starfuckery (A-list only, pls). In other words, if you’re a movie star and/or have a wildly expensive TV project, HBO is no longer the only player in town.
The consensus around the industry is that HBO and Max are focused on in-house brands, as evidenced by the spate of Game of Thrones spinoffs that were in development over the last few years. Some of them are bearing out — like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the TV adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Dunk and Egg book series — while others, like the spinoff series for Kit Harington’s Jon Snow character, are not.
“We develop a lot of ideas — sometimes they come together, sometimes they don’t,” Casey Bloys, HBO and Max content chief, told the audience at an HBO/Max programming slate presentation on Nov. 12. He added that Harington, Martin and HBO all agreed that the project “just didn’t come together.”
“You try a lot of things, try a lot of different stories,” Bloys said. “Some end up surprising you, some not. You just try and hope you find some interesting story.”
In this week’s Series Business, you’ll learn:
Agents’ complaints about HBO
A backdoor way to get HBO to buy your show
How Bloys is balancing returning series and original orders
How one agent and creator translated what Max wanted into a series buy
The surprising format that Max is interested in
Who’s best positioned to get HBO Max to buy a show
How HBO Max development compares with Amazon and Netflix today
The budget concerns that loom over what HBO Max is buying
How agents perceive the health of the HBO brand heading into 2025