It didn’t even come good in Europe, and HBO Max saves money: list of cancelled investments

It hasn’t even launched well, and HBO Max is making waves among streaming enthusiasts in Europe. Unfortunately, the popularity of the service doesn’t necessarily translate into fabulous finances for the parent company, hence the need to economise.

HBO Max operates under parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, which has just broken away from the American telephone operator AT&T. Among other things, the split appears to have reflected in a series of financial difficulties for the streaming platform. As a result, although there is no talk of restructuring at the moment, production on a number of important films and series, especially those produced in collaboration with European studios, has been halted.

HBO Max is saving money

HBO Max has announced, according to Variety, that it will no longer make original productions for the streaming service in most of Europe. Basically, productions that would have been made in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Central Europe, the Netherlands and Turkey have been canceled. The only exceptions to this blow, at least for the moment, are creations that were to be released from Spain and France.

The announcement now is part of a larger cost-cutting plan that is expected to add $3 billion to the Warner Bros. budget. Discovery after the spin-off from AT&T. “We are analyzing current content proposals on existing services,” a spokesman for the parent company explained to the publication. “As part of this process, we have decided to remove a limited amount of original content from HBO Max, as well as shut down our original content efforts for HBO Max in the Nordics and Central Europe. We have also discontinued nascent content development activities in new territories, such as the Netherlands and Turkey, which began last year.”

The major problem, apart from the fact that you won’t see sequels to beloved series like Lust (Sweden), Kamikaze (Denmark) or The Informant (Hungary), is that they will disappear from the streaming service globally.