WarnerMedia CEO talks House of the Dragon: “The Targaryens are about as crazy as they get”

After a bit of a rough start, HBO Max has picked up a lot of steam, with Deadline reporting that it’s racked up about 44.2 million subscribers as of the end of the first quarter of 2021. Parent company WarnerMedia has plans to keep that roll going, including by giving viewers juicy content like House of the Dragon, HBO’s follow-up to Game of Thrones.

Set over 100 years before the original series, House of the Dragon tells the story of a brutal civil war between different factions of the Targaryen family, complete with dragon-vs-dragon aerial battles. “I’m just so excited because the world that exists in Westeros and the broader landscape and the characters,” WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar said during a virtual appearance at the MoffettNathanson Media and Communications Summit. “The Targaryens are about as crazy as they get. It’s literally the essence of good drama.”

The word “crazy” is a sensitive one when talking about the Targaryens because some of them are literally mad, but I’m guessing Kilar was inferring to the general insanity of the story, which is drawn from the pages of George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood. And indeed, the story is pretty nuts, and has a lot of what made Game of Thrones popular, including betrayals, romance, shocking reversals of fortune and a large cast of characters caught up in an epic struggle for power.

What’s the state of HBO Max?

While it’s always fun to check in on House of the Dragon, Kilar spent most of his time talking about HBO Max, which has been debuting big Warner Bros. movies at the same time they drop in theaters. Kilar acknowledges that “Lots of different reasonable people will come to different conclusions” about the strategy, but argues that it’s a success. After all, movies like Godzilla vs. Kong and Mortal Kombat have still had healthy box office performances despite being available for streaming on HBO Max, the strategy has attracted a lot of new people to the service, and it’s given moviegoers a safe alternative to going to the theaters during the pandemic. “I’d argue we’ve done more for theaters in 2021 than anyone else in Hollywood, by far.”

WarnerMedia has plans to screen movies exclusively in theaters again, but it sounds like they’ve taken some lessons from this experience. “There will be those stories that are so epic in scope and fit a certain sensibility that we feel that an exclusive theatrical release makes sense,” Kilar said. “But there will be other stories that are different, that we actually think hew much closer to what we’re seeing this year in terms of movies that are available on HBO Max the same day that they’re made available to exhibition. It’s going to be fascinating to see how that all evolves.”

"The world will change and we all need to change with it, including exhibition. We’re committing to navigating that path with theaters, but at the same time not taking our eye off the customer…In a very tumultuous year, it’s going very well. And I’d argue it can go well in 2022 and beyond as well."

Finally, Kilar touched on a new ad-supported version of HBO Max coming in June. “I think your conclusion when you see it is going to be, ‘Wow, this is elegant,'” he said, setting the bar pretty high. “This is unlike any other service in terms of how they have executed this, how thoughtful they have been in terms of ad load and staying away from creative fatigue and just the chrome, the user interface, the pixels. It’s something we’ve been sweating a lot…We lived up to the brand promise of HBO.”

The streaming wars continue.

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