WarnerMedia Unveils HBO Max Price, Launch Date

During a Tuesday afternoon presentation at Stage 21 on Warner Bros. Studios’ historic Burbank lot, the company that owns the storied Hollywood studio as well as television networks HBO, TBS/TNT and CNN revealed that forthcoming streaming service HBO Max will bow in May and cost $15 per month, the same price as HBO but with significantly more TV shows and movies.

HBO Max will be filled with 10,000 hours of programming from across the media conglomerate’s divisions including such TV hits as Friends, The Big Bang Theory and South Park; Warner Bros. films including Joker; the full HBO catalog; and originals such as the previously announced Ansel Elgort drama Tokyo Vice, a Grease spinoff and a Gossip Girl sequel.

for WarnerMedia, the event was designed to make the case to investors why phone giant AT&T, which has $134 billion in debt, is investing heavily to modernize the WarnerMedia business just a year after spending $85.4 billion to buy the assets. Like Disney, which will launch Disney+ on Nov. 12, and NBCUniversal, which is prepping Peacock, WarnerMedia executives have been watching as pay TV subscribers decline and young people eschew the movie theater for Netflix. But it will cost as much as $4 billion over the next three years for WarnerMedia to build out the HBO Max content library, and that doesn’t include investments in technology infrastructure, marketing and subscriber acquisition.