Warner Bros dates the return of the Game Of Thrones spin-off series House Of The Dragon, whilst promising us that it has plenty more on its slate.
Warner Bros has confirmed that a second season of House Of The Dragon will be coming to our screens in June. Although an exact date wasn’t given. the announcement falls into line with expectations given that the Game Of Thrones spin-off series was previously slated to arrive in early summer.
As well as trumpeting the return of one of its big ticket shows, Warner Bros also used the announcement to remind us that there is more on the way, following plenty of disruption created by last year’s strikes.
J B Perrette, head of global streaming and games for Warner Bros Discovery also stated that “When we look at the next 12-18-24 months, we have all of our four biggest HBO tentpoles – House Of The Dragon Season Two coming in June,” as well as new installments of The Last Of Us, Euphoria and White Lotus.”
That’s a lot of good TV (finally) headed our way but there’s more too. Perrette also mentioned that Warners’ TV arm would be following the lead of the entire company to focus on “bigger Warner Brothers IP” for originals. As such, less of the Winning Time(s) or the Julia(s) stated Perrette, and more of The Penguin. A Dune TV series and a show based around The Conjuring was also teased.
Whilst we do like the sound of those shows, we hope that doesn’t mean that the ever-dependent HBO will be producing less original storytelling.
Finally, Perrette offered a few thoughts on the company’s streaming play so far, with its Max platform having failed to bring in the big numbers that the company had hoped for.
“In the eight months following [Max launch], for a variety of reasons, some that we knew about some that were related to the strike,” says Perrette, “we went into probably the lightest content slate we’ve ever had”.
WBD signed an output deal with A24 in December that kicked off this quarter. “So in the back half of last year, our pay one movies were significantly less volume, our Warner Bros. slate, other than Barbie, which is obviously a huge hit, was lighter, and not as strong as as we had hoped.”
Corporate speak, eh? Love it when people talk about pay one movies and significantly less volume.
The head of streaming is more bullish about the slate for the next couple of years but given that all the talk these days is about the streaming wars being over and an age of consolidation being on the horizon, could it be too late for Max (hich hasn’t even arrived yet the UK))?
Time will tell but the platform is clearly turning to its big guns for the immediate future to try and win back some of those streaming dollars over the coming years.
