Max Sets France Launch for Summer 2024 (EXCLUSIVE)
Warner Bros. Discovery will be launching its streaming service Max in France, one of its top European markets, next summer, Variety has learned.
The launch in France and in Belgium will follow a rollout in 22 countries across the Nordics, Iberia, Spain, the Netherlands and Central Eastern Europe in the spring. The European plan was unveiled in broad strokes by Gerhard Zeiler, president of international at Warner Bros. Discovery, and Leah Hooper, Warner Bros. Discovery’s European head of streaming, during a keynote at Mipcom Cannes on Monday.
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Hooper also announced that Max will stream live sport in Europe with Eurosport’s rights portfolio, including Grand Slam tennis, cycling’s Grand Tours, as well as coverage of the Olympic Games which will be held in Paris starting next July and will be streamed live and on demand on Max. The streamer will offer live simulcasts of our local entertainment networks in some countries.
In France, WBD currently has an exclusive partnership with Amazon Prime Video which kicked off in March and was meant to run until at least the end of 2024. Under WBD and Prime Video’s partnership in France, an offer called Warner Pass, boasts all of HBO programs, along with 12 channels, including Warner TV, Eurosport, Discovery Channel, Cartoon Network and CNN, as well as their associated on-demand services are available on Prime Video channels. While WBD is expected to roll out Max as a standalone service in France, it may maintain its pact with Prime Video until the end of the year.
In the U.S., where the service Max launched in May, subscribers are still able to access the service through Prime Video Channels for at least the next two years. A similar plan might be set up in France for the remainder of 2024.
Warner Bros. Discovery has scaled down its programming strategy in Europe as part of a cost-saving strategy and stopped producing scripted originals for HBO Max across the Nordics, Central Europe, the Netherlands and Turkey, the company has identified France and Spain as key strategic markets. As such, WBD has commissioned scripted original content in those two territories. In France, WBD ordered its first original, “The Mythomaniac of the Bataclan” a four-part series inspired by the true story of a woman who conned her way into a victims’ association and quickly became one of its pillars. The series, which stars Laure Calamy (“The Origin of Evil,” “Call My Agent!”), is expected to premiere on Max in the fall. The banner is also still producing unscripted content in Europe, for instance “First Five,” a three-part documentary series, in Finland, and other programs in Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
Speaking at Mipcom, Zeiler said when Warner Bros Discovery “integrated these two companies,” they “set three goals 18 months ago.”
“Number one, we wanted to define what is the mission, what is our vision; the second goal was to execute this integration as fast as possible, and I won’t lie — as efficiently as possible — and the third goal was to create a new culture of these two distinctive companies,” Zeiler continued.
“We are a content company. We are storytellers. That’s our mission. That is our vision,” Zeiler said. “And when you look at the stories we tell, it’s a really, broad foundation — from feature films to scripted content to unscripted TV content to animation to sports to news.”
While at Mipcom, Zeiler also said streaming has evolved in the 12 months. “The era of streaming where we saw the great delivery of content underpriced is slowly over. There is a much more rational about thinking about that.”
He said HBO Max is the “only streaming service outside Netflix” that was “slightly profitable” in the first half year of this year. “The others are still losing a lot of money.”
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