Casey Bloys isn’t ready to reveal details on his future at the combined Paramount-Warner Bros. just yet. But speaking Thursday at the Bloomberg Screentime conference, he didn’t deny expectations that he will continue to run HBO Max and add Paramount+ to the mix once the merger is official.“I’m not going to get into my job requirements or anything like that. But so here’s what I will say.
Obviously, there was news this week,” he said, referring to Paramount streaming boss Cindy Holland announcing her departure. I will say that the merger is not closed. I believe that David [Ellison] and the team want to announce their leadership structure, it’s not mine to announce.
So I don’t have any news to confirm.” At the same time, Bloys said that he’s had many conversations with Ellison, “and he is very excited, very respectful of what the HBO team has done, not just in my tenure, but the entire history of HBO. All of the owners that we have had, we have had people come in genuinely excited and wanting to maintain what we’ve done. And I really believe that he will do that.” Bloys wouldn’t comment on how soon HBO Max and Paramount+ might merge, or if a bundle was in the immediate future.
But he did note that “the HBO Max Disney bundle has been very successful” and a similar setup would make a lot of sense. As for the question of whether HBO and Paramount+ programming will mesh, Bloys said: “I’ve had people say to me, ‘OK, so the Taylor Sheridan stuff and HBO,’ it’s a version of what people said to us about HBO and the Warner Bros. library. I go back to people who watch HBO tend to like television tend to be consumers of television, and that doesn’t just mean HBO.
We had ‘South Park’ on our platform, one of the one of the big properties at Paramount+. It did so well, we sued them when they when they took it off.” Bloys noted that he learned a lot when Warner Bros. and Discovery merged, and how it ultimately didn’t make sense to combine Discovery fare with HBO content. Library and Pay One Movies, and here’s the Discovery content.
And what we found out in the world, and what we found through research with current subscribers, potential subscribers, is they didn’t they didn’t want it. We have a strategy officer who has a good line, ‘you have to give subscribers what they want, not what you own.’ And so what we found very quickly in doing research on Max, subscribers said ‘we want movies, we want HBO, we want drama series, comedy series, documentaries,’ and they just weren’t feeling some of the other stuff. So you have to listen to that, and you have to evolve.” Asked how he reacted to the idea that Netflix might purchase Warner Bros.
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