Since its inception in early 2020, Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) streaming service HBO Max has made headlines with its original series. HBO had a unique leg up in the original content game. The Home Box Office was kicking out its own series long before anyone could conceive of an alternative to cable television. You could say that HBO was hosting subscription-based entertainment way before it was cool.
Shows like "Sex and the City," "Entourage," and "Girls" put HBO on the map. Through the 2010s, the hits kept coming--"The Sopranos", "The Wire", and "Game of Thrones" brought more subscribers than ever to the service. Anyone wanting to stay in touch with pop culture needed to see HBO's exclusive, boundary-pushing content.
With the rise of Netflix (NFLX), Hulu, and Disney (DIS) Plus came the massively competitive streaming wars. Audiences at home were now faced with enough options -- and enough costs -- to start picking and choosing which streamers to subscribe to.
The streaming wars of late have been hinging on the exclusivity of IPs. Each streamer wants to gather in as many valuable, well-established IPs as possible, keeping original content flowing and subscriptions up. When HBO Max launched under the flag of Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD), the streamer had lots of long-standing IPs already under its belt with "Harry Potter", "Looney Toons", and the awkwardly-growing DC Studios and the comic company's more well-established animation library.
Up until recently, DC Studios has been making content all over the map. Its previous streaming service, DC Universe, gave subscribers access to digital comics as well as a wealth of video content from its popular CW shows like "Titans" and "Doom Patrol" and beloved animated series like "Young Justice" and "Harley Quinn".
But once DC Universe folded into HBO Max, the name of the game was the same with every streamer: exclusivity. Drive subscribers to the platform with shiny new content that can only be found in one place. Sounds like a solid strategy, yeah?
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Warner Brothers Discovery is Shopping DC Animated Titles in an Unusual Place
Last week, at a development conference called Content London, Warner Bros. Discovery television executive Channing Dungey sat down to chat about the major product house’s future plans for DC television content. Dungey said that the studio is “exploring animated IP on different platforms.”
Specifically Amazon (AMZN).
“With animation we used to be about staying in-house but now we are doing it on different platforms,” Dungey told convention attendees. “HBO Max is the first stop but we are in the process of closing a big deal with Amazon featuring DC branded content in animation.”
Warner Brothers Discovery's Bold Move Could Cut Costs
Dungey also indicated that the company would be taking a closer look at how to pare down production costs. “There was a feeling for a while that if you’re not spending $10M an hour then you’re not doing your job,” she said. “But it doesn’t take that to make a great show and doing things differently in the pandemic underscored that.”
It's an unprecedented move in an industry clamoring for intellectual property. But outsourcing production to Amazon's animation studios may be the key to this decision. After all, Amazon hasn't been quiet about its willingness to throw money at a famous property. This certainly falls in line with Warner Brothers Discovery’s goal to eliminate $3 billion from its overall budget -- and this time they can do it without canning an entire movie.
