Warner Bros. Discovery to focus on Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and other franchises

Since taking over the newly merged company Warner Bros. Discovery, CEO David Zaslav has suffered through a lot of bad press. He’s been culling content in an effort to save costs; the cancellation of the already-shot Batgirl movie was the story that made the most waves there. He’s also talked about downplaying the company’s streaming service HBO Max, and this at a time when the streaming wars are hotter than they’ve ever been.

The bad news kept coming in a recent earnings call where Zaslav and company revealed that HBO Max and Discovery+ had added a collective 2.8 million global subscribers by the end of the third quarter of 2022, bringing the total to 94.9 million. That’s good, but it fell short of expected gains of 3.27 million subscribers.

Revenue projects fell short, too, according to Tech Crunch: analysts expected  $10.51 billion in revenue but the company only posted $9.82 billion. Again, it’s not that these numbers are bad, but in the fake economy comprised of stock portfolios, it doesn’t really matter how much you’re bringing in, whether you employ people or whether you’re producing good products; all that matters is whether your stock price goes up or down. And because Warner Bros. Discovery is perceived to be in disarray, its stock price has dropped 49% over the course of this year.

Hybrid HBO Max-Discovery+ streaming service will probably cost more

Perhaps WBD can reverse its fortunes by combining HBO Max and Discovery+ into one streaming service? That’s the plan, and should go into effect sometime in the spring.

Zaslav and co have been canceling HBO Max content — passing on J.J. Abrams’ Demimonde, gutting the animation and family departments — to make room for all the reality shows and such that Discovery+ will bring in. So the combined service will have more content overall, but maybe less that you actually want to watch, depending on your taste.

It will also probably cost more. Discovery streaming and games CEO JB Perrette said that he expects the price to go “north” once the combined streaming service debuts. At $15 per month, HBO Max is already on the higher end when it comes to streaming services, but a price hike is worth it if it means less quality scripted content and more reality shows from the Property Brothers Cinematic Universe, right?

Warner Bros. Discovery will “focus on franchises” like Game of Thrones and DC

Looking at all this, it feels like Zaslav, at least, is done with the notion that producing lots of movies and shows is the number one priority for a studio. “The grand experiment of creating something at any cost is over,” he said, per Deadline.

"I was recently asked if I thought the golden age of content was over. I said absolutely not. There’s nothing more important than content, people consuming more content than they ever have. But it has to be great content. It’s no longer about how much."

For Zaslav, this focus on quality over quantity means drilling down on big franchises and tentpole movies and shows. “We haven’t had a ‘Superman’ movie in 13 years,” he said. “We haven’t done a ‘Harry Potter’ movie in 15 years. The DC movies and the ‘Harry Potter’ movies provided a lot of the profits of Warner Bros. Motion Pictures over the last 25 years. So a focus on the franchise — one of the big advantages that we have, ‘House of the Dragon’ is an example of that, ‘Game of Thrones,’ taking advantage of ‘Sex and the City,’ ‘Lord of the Rings,’ we still have the right to do ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies. What are the movies that have brands that are understood and loved everywhere in the world?”

"And a focus on the big movies that are loved, that are tentpoled, that people are going to leave early from dinner to go to see — and we have a lot of them. Batman, Superman, Aquaman, if we can do something with JK on ‘Harry Potter’ going forward, ‘Lord of the Rings,’ what are we doing with ‘Game of Thrones’? What are we doing with a lot of the big franchises that we have? We’re focused on franchises."

Warner Bros. Discovery wants to work with J.K. Rowling on more Harry Potter movies

There’s a fair amount to unpack there. To start, it’s interesting that Zaslav says WBD hasn’t made a Harry Potter movie in “15 years,” which implies he doesn’t consider the Fantastic Beasts movies to be Harry Potter movies. Maybe he wants to get serious about adapting Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for the big screen…or maybe he just forgot the Fantastic Beasts movies exist like everyone else.

In the realm of DC, WBD has made some crowd-pleasing moves lately by bringing back Henry Cavill to play Superman as well as installing Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn as one of the people in charge of managing the DC Extended Universe going forward. That’s a potential bright spot for the studio.

And then there’s House of the Dragon, which has been a big success for HBO and HBO Max. HBO is developing a number of other Game of Thrones spinoff series, although they’ve been careful not to oversaturate the market. With Zaslav “focusing on franchises,” I have to wonder if that will change.

He mentions Lord of the Rings movies, too, although that situation is weird right now. Amazon is making a Lord of the Rings TV show, New Line Cinema is making an animated movie…the rights to that series are spread out all over the place and I honestly don’t know what exactly remains to WBD.

I just hope Zaslav listens to the advice of people whose thinking goes beyond “franchises are good.” It’s also about exactly how and when to develop them, which changes depending on the franchise. The last time Warner Bros. made Lord of the Rings movies we got The Hobbit trilogy, which is better forgotten. An attempt to expand the Harry Potter franchise resulted in the Fantastic Beasts series, which has produced drastically diminishing returns. I’d hate for something like that to happen to the Game of Thrones franchise, which is riding high right now because HBO waited patiently for the right project and the right people to run it.

We’ll see how things shake out at Warner Bros. Discovery over the next few years. Keep your fingers crossed.

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h/t The A.V. Club, Variety