While Wall Street pundits and investors no longer consider subscription growth as the primary metric of interest for evaluating streaming services, it’s still an important factor. Warner Bros Discovery has not had the easiest year, especially on the stock market, and its lagging streaming growth despite the splashy appeal of its flagship Max service has been part of the issue. However, they’ve finally reached an important milestone in this matter, and Brandon Blake, our entertainment attorney in Los Angeles from Blake & Wang P.A., is here to report on it.
Crossing a Major Benchmark
Across their three primary platforms, Max, HBO, and Discovery+, Warner Bros Discovery can now lay claim to 103M subscribers. This covers another 3.6M subs onboarded in their latest financial quarter.
However, that was about the only good news from their latest earnings, and even then, the streaming segment of the company still lost money. However, it was a small loss, reaching just over, ironically, $100M in Q2. However, the company as a whole posted a massive $10B loss in the same quarter, primarily driven by asset revaluation, including the rather shocking valuation that the WBD TV networks were worth 9B less than anticipated.
Some Pleasant Surprises
While the box office bomb that was Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was a Q2 flop for WBD, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire provided a pleasant buffer, and the upcoming releases of Joker: Folie à Deux and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice should do well for it in the second half of the year, too. Luckily for WBD, it had the first episodes of House of the Dragon Season 2, the strong performance of Hacks Season 3, and the Dune: Part Two streaming release to buoy them.
WBD is also looking to launch a sports-focused streaming service, Venu, in the near future. Could this be the impetus the struggling company needs to turn its fortunes around? It’s certainly a good start.
Film and Television 