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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 will follow a rollout in Northern and Eastern Europe, which is expected to be unveiled by Gerhard Zeiler, president of international at Warner Bros. Discovery, during his keynote at Mipcom Cannes on Monday.
WBD currently has an exclusive partnership with Amazon Prime Video in France, 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 launched in March and 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 the year.
While Warner Bros. Discovery has scaled down its programming strategy in Europe as part of a cost-saving strategy and stopped producing originals for 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 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.
It was also announced during the keynote that Max will launch in Latin America in Q1 of next year and will be launching in Europe, starting with the first 22 countries across the Nordics, Iberia, Spain and Netherlands in the spring.
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.”
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