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When David Zaslav unveiled his $43 billion plan to merge Discovery with WarnerMedia, he promised to find $3 billion in annual cost savings. Now, after searching under couch cushions at the newly combined Warner Bros. Discovery, he appears to have found some spare change at HBO Max.
The streaming service has removed a handful of original movies that were previously available exclusively to its subscribers—including the Seth Rogen time-travel comedy An American Pickle, Robert Zemeckis’s remake of The Witches starring Anne Hathaway and Octavia Spencer, and the Cole Sprouse and Lana Condor rom-com Moonshot—in what a company insider describes as a broader move to write off some costs of currently low-performing content.
Redditors first noticed that the films, which also include the Doug Liman heist movie Locked Down and the Angel Manuel Soto drama Charm City Kings, were no longer available on HBO Max, and Variety subsequently reported their removal from the service. Warner Bros. Discovery has also quietly removed other titles from HBO Max in recent weeks, including Hungarian original drama series The Informant.
Though many of these films and TV series were produced by Warner Bros. Studios, HBO Max still pays to license them for its service. Fees for all those titles—HBO Max advertises “thousands of hours of series, movies, and exclusive originals”—can add up.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s decision to remove some exclusive originals from HBO Max comes as the company prepares to eventually merge the streamer with sister service Discovery+.
Executives at the company have had a lot of big decisions to make since the merger went into effect earlier this year. In June, HBO scrapped plans for an expansive HBO drama Demimonde from J.J. Abrams, and earlier this week they revealed that they had shelved DC film Batgirl starring Leslie Grace, and an animated Scooby-Doo film. Zaslav is expected to give an update on the business Thursday, when the company reports its quarterly earnings.
Though The Witches, American Pickle, and the other films are no longer streaming on HBO Max, viewers can still pay to watch them through marketplaces like Apple’s iTunes.
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