Last November, Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and Max content, primed the press for a new-look HBO. It: Welcome to Derry—a prequel to Stephen King’s 1986 novel, ABC’s 1990 miniseries, and Welcome to Derry cocreator Andy Muschietti’s modern movie duology—had recently recorded the third-biggest debut in HBO history, behind only House of the Dragon and The Last of Us. (It’s audience would only grow, setting the stage for a not yet confirmed but still anticipated second season.) For Bloys, importing Pennywise, a horrifying, clown-like killer who’d been scaring readers and viewers for 40 years, to a network known for non-supernatural characters crafted for HBO—Tony Soprano and Stringer Bell; Al Swearengen and Logan Roy; Carrie Bradshaw and Selina Meyer; Larrys Sanders and David—was part of a pivot for HBO’s brand: “Leaning into the power of IP to help fill a void.”
As Bloys explained, HBO can no longer count on stuffing its schedule with films from other studios; as the streaming wars have escalated, those competitors have stopped licensing features to rival services. (Comcast-owned Universal Pictures, for instance, now earmarks its movies for Comcast-owned Peacock.) Save for flicks from corporate cousin Warner Bros. and producer and distributor A24, with whom it has a pay-1 deal, HBO is on its own. Hence its increased reliance on “highly recognized” properties from the WB stable. “That affinity and immediate awareness paired with HBO’s singular approach to storytelling has proven very valuable to filling that theatrical void,” Bloys said. “So, in considering the alchemy of strong HBO programming coupled with … beloved Warner Brothers IP that drives attention, you see a recipe that’s led to great success for us over the last year or so.”
Seven months later, that strategy is bearing further fruit. As a generation of HBO shows that followed the phenomenon of Game of Thrones sunsets, the network is quadrupling down on fantasy, sci-fi, and superheroes. In February, HBO announced the forthcoming conclusion of Industry; in May, Euphoria and Hacks (as well as The Comeback) ended their runs. In their place, HBO will depend on several load-bearing franchises—some assembled in-house and others already familiar from previous incarnations.
The return of House of the Dragon on Sunday, in the wake of The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ successful six-week run from January to February, continues a relay race of WB IP tentpoles: the launch of Lanterns in August; the continuation of Dune: Prophecy sometime before the end of the year; the premiere of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone at Christmas, which will initiate a decade’s worth of Potter TV. And there’s more genre material to come, including additional Thrones spinoffs and planned TV adaptations of Baldur’s Gate and V for Vendetta. If we assume that The Penguin will eventually get a second season—still uncertain, amid production of the next Batman movie—then by the end of the year, there will be as many active HBO sci-fi, fantasy, or superhero dramas as there were in the whole prior history of the network (excluding miniseries and anthology shows).
HBO Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Superhero Dramas (Non-Miniseries or Anthology)
On all-time rankings of HBO’s best series and greatest Sunday nights, “adult dramas” centered on sordid crimes and dysfunctional families predominate. Even now, HBO isn’t all in on nerd-inflected franchises. The premium purveyor of prestige TV still hosts and develops a healthy slate of dramas, comedies, and dramedies that would have fit the HBO bill during any era of the network. But the brand is undoubtedly evolving: All of those “highly recognized” projects have made the HBO of today almost unrecognizable as the all-originals enterprise of old. “Comic books, juice boxes, robot crap all over the place,” Tony Blundetto ranted to his twin sons on The Sopranos Season 5. Substitute “fantasy epics” for “juice boxes,” and Tony B. could’ve been describing HBO’s revamped approach to programming. Aside from the “crap” part, presumably—although that depends on which season of Westworld we’re talking about.
This franchise-forward reframing of HBO’s traditional focus could cause an identity crisis—or constitute an opportunity. For now, the network’s strategic shift presents a few questions. Can the network known for having “the highest ‘hit rate’ for high-quality programming” neatly synthesize its established sensibilities with those of preexisting properties? Will an emphasis on franchises reshape HBO more than HBO reshapes the franchises it touches? And can HBO board the bandwagon of investing in trans-media universes—and borrow liberally from WB’s library—without becoming regular-ass TV?
On the margins, HBO has gotten geeky almost from the start. Home Box Office’s first original episodic programming debuted in 1983, offering something for everyone: satirical sketch comedy series Not Necessarily the News, Muppet-powered kid’s musical show Fraggle Rock, hard-boiled detective drama Philip Marlowe, Private Eye … and The Hitchhiker, a mystery/thriller/horror anthology series with some supernatural elements that aired on HBO until 1987. More horror and sci-fi smorgasbords followed: The Ray Bradbury Theater (1985-86); Tales From the Crypt (1989-96); and a spinoff of the latter, Perversions of Science (1997). But those were mostly midweek diversions that predated HBO’s ascendance as a destination for “serious” drama.
For the first decade after Oz announced HBO’s ambitions as a home for one-hour dramas, “gritty” and “grounded” were the network’s watchwords. The fantastical Carnivàle was the exception to HBO’s non-supernatural Sundays—a little-seen and short-lived (albeit fondly remembered) show that stands out like the subject of a “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)” segment amid the period’s Sopranos–Six Feet Under–The Wire–Deadwood prestige-pantheon spree. (Ronald D. Moore served as showrunner for the first season of Carnivàle before departing to take the reins of a landmark sci-fi series that might have been a good get for HBO: Battlestar Galactica.) That changed in 2008 with True Blood, the vampire drama that premiered months before the first Twilight film, posted the strongest HBO ratings since the Sopranos finale, and lasted for seven seasons.
Then came Thrones in 2011, which grew into a cultural sensation. To an even greater extent than True Blood, Thrones laid out the template for an HBO-coded, mature take on a genre that up to that point hadn’t been within the network’s wheelhouse. Thrones was lascivious, violent, and sophisticated—a show about politics, power, and effed-up families, transposed into a fantasy setting. (Think Succession with swords.) It brought HBO budgets, production values, and artistry to a type of storytelling that hadn’t typically been treated to such lavish looks on TV—and, at times, it downplayed its source material’s more mystical, magical elements (for better or worse) in the interest of broader public appeal.
As much as any other crossover sensation, Thrones cemented the consensus that nerd culture had become mainstream culture, which removed much of the remaining snobbish stigma surrounding sci-fi, fantasy, and superheroes. Other networks and streamers pursued their own Thrones equivalents, with mixed results. At HBO, the Thrones breakout seemed to lower the resistance to all manner of speculative or supernatural fare, from well-received limited series such as Years and Years (2019), Watchmen (2019), The Outsider (2020), and The Plot Against America (2020) to planned multi-season series that went one and done because they didn’t connect with audiences (Lovecraft Country, The Nevers, The Time Traveler’s Wife). In certain cases, HBO teamed up with British production partners BBC or Sky to tell supernatural or dystopian/alternate-history stories. One such show, canceled after two seasons, was a rare sci-fi comedy, Avenue 5. (Speaking of failed comedic ventures: Don’t confuse HBO’s franchise era for its The Franchise era, which lasted for all of eight weeks.)
Some HBO forays into more surreal narrative realms straddled the line between paranormal and psychological explanations (Here and Now, or the first and fourth seasons of True Detective) or used a sci-fi-flavored premise as a starting point for a nuanced exploration of trauma and recovery (The Leftovers). With more explicitly sci-fi or fantasy series such as Westworld and His Dark Materials, HBO revived pieces of IP that had lain dormant on-screen for some time. But what we’re seeing now is a new phase of explicit franchise construction or expansion.
One key component of that effort is the ongoing transformation of George R.R. Martin’s fictional world of Westeros—first from the basis for a beloved, bestselling, but far-from-monocultural series of fantasy novels into the setting of the biggest small-screen smash of its era, and then from that blockbuster beachhead into a sprawling small-screen franchise. (And soon, a theatrical property, too.) Partly by design and partly because of developmental dead ends, HBO has proceeded more slowly than expected in mining Martin’s material for more TV gold: It took more than three years after the fateful, hateful finale of Game of Thrones for HBO to put a successor series on the air, and almost four years after that for the Thrones prequel portfolio to expand to two shows at a time. “It’s funny, when A Knight of Seven Kingdoms comes out there’s language around ‘another Game of Thrones spinoff,’” Bloys said in March. “And I like to remind people, this is [only] the second one.”
HBO’s reward for its forbearance has been a robust brand and two hit shows—not Thrones-level hits, but that would be setting the standard higher than the Wall. With the franchising of Thrones proceeding deliberately, though, the bulk of the recent uptick in HBO’s fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero catalog has stemmed from the migration of series based on WB IP from streaming-only Max originals to mainline HBO content. Two years ago, Bloys explained the rebrand: “As we started producing those [Max] shows, we were using the same methods, the same kind of thinking, as how we would approach HBO shows. In a lot of cases, the same talent that has worked on HBO shows.” Hence, he continued, “The idea of the delineation started to feel unnecessary. Like, why are we doing this? Let’s just call them what they are: HBO shows.” This was another “lean in”: “For a show that feels big and cinematic, [viewers] already are going to make the assumption that it feels like an HBO show,” he said. “This is just leaning into that.”
Consequently, It, Lanterns, and Harry Potter became HBO shows, and The Penguin and Dune: Prophecy soon joined them. This may seem like a distinction without a difference, considering those series would stream on (the re-renamed) HBO Max either way. But it does affect their availability on linear TV—the HBO shows air on cable TV, too, for non-cord-cutters—and it also connotes a certain cachet. Max, Bloys laid out last year, is the home of “cost-efficient” shows with “a greater number of episodes that can return each year.” It’s the home of the innings eaters—more procedural than prestige. That doesn’t preclude the possibility of huge Max hits, like The Pitt. But the big-budget tentpoles are still reserved for the flagship channel—and it’s certainly a sea change that the corporate powers don’t think that piling IP under the HBO banner will sully or dilute that three-letter brand. HBO may have let The Walking Dead and Stranger Things get away, but The Last of Us and Welcome to Derry will do.
The White Lotus aside, HBO’s current heavy hitters, such as The Last of Us and Dragon, do tend to cluster on the supernatural side. Presumably, Potter will be next (unless Lanterns finds a large audience first). Although plenty of former Potter loyalists will skip the series because of author (and TV EP) J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans rhetoric, the success of Hogwarts Legacy—which became the bestselling video game of 2023, despite some efforts to boycott it—suggests that the fan base’s appetite for Potter is still strong enough to overcome the backlash. David Zaslav thinks so: On an earnings call last year, the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president crowed, “We’ll have 10 consecutive years of Harry Potter and be able to amortize that globally around the world.”
I love to amortize TV globally as much as the next network bigwig, but it’s not exactly inspiring to hear Zaslav rave about the Potter re-retelling in terms of its long-lasting commercial appeal instead of its creative worth. For Zaslav, it’s not TV. It’s IP. Naturally, CEOs gonna try to maximize value for shareholders, and creatives gonna create. Zaslav, who hasn’t failed at the moneymaking part, has been pushing WB IP for years. The line between leveraging and exploiting those properties will be held—or blurred—by Bloys.
On that score, the HBO chief has said the right things about quality (and quantity) control. “We’ve been very, very judicious about shows that we produce,” he said in January about his plans for Thrones, adding, “This is not Marvel level, four series a year, or anything like that.” In March, he sang a similar tune about how he evaluates potential HBO additions to the DC Universe. “Is it a good script? Do we think it’s interesting creatively? Do we think it makes sense as a show? … Anytime you lay out a thing dictating in advance how many shows you’re going to have per year, it sets up an opportunity where you might compromise creatively. And so I think it’s always better [to] just start every project, ‘What do we think of what’s in front of us here?’ versus, well, ‘If we don’t have this one, we can’t have that one.’”
Disney might have benefited from such restraint before it flooded the market with Marvel and Star Wars. Maybe nerd culture needs HBO as much as or more than HBO needs nerd culture.
Take The Penguin, a series inspired by Batman IP that nonetheless worked without so much as a superhero cameo, and with only infrequent references to the Caped Crusader. The show scaled up its audience over its eight-episode season and went on to earn 24 Emmy nominations and nine wins. It thrived by fusing its foundation of familiar IP with HBO’s signature style, an approach that Lanterns is aiming to emulate. “We have this incredibly rich mythology within the Green Lantern canon, and we have this incredibly rich history of Sunday night HBO shows—everything from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones and in between,” cocreator and showrunner Chris Mundy said last month.
Although Green Lantern diehards might be disappointed that Lanterns isn’t, ahem, leaning into the mythology more, Hollywood has already done that, and it hasn’t always gone great. “The fun of it was to try to create a real, layered drama that dealt with who these characters are as human beings while still staying true to the spirit of what makes the comics so special,” Mundy said. “We wanted it to be accessible for anyone who doesn’t know the canon but, at the same time, satisfying for people who know the lore in minute detail.” It’s dangerous to over-invoke Andor, but as the celebrated Star Wars series demonstrated, a fresh spin on somewhat stale, stuck-in-a-rut IP can work wonders.
In his recent Substack analyses of 2025’s top streaming series, industry analyst Entertainment Strategy Guy showed that “streaming TV shows are far less dependent on preexisting IP than films are these days” and that “IP doesn’t dominate streaming television. At least not popular IP.” (He wasn’t counting, say, TV versions of lesser-known novels, a category that includes a long list of HBO adaptations.) HBO will need more than prequels, sequels, and spinoffs to maintain its momentum, and from all appearances, there’s plenty in the pipeline that could claim Sunday slots when The Last of Us (likely) ends after its third season and Dragon (probably) follows after its fourth.
Thus far, HBO has weathered occasional lulls and skillfully blended its amped-up IP approach with its trademark feel for originals. On the whole, the ESG concluded, “HBO did well in 2025,” before mounting an “elite run” to begin 2026. Nearly everything the network has aired this year—not just A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, but also Euphoria, Rooster, and DTF St. Louis—has hit. And it still has a Larry David reprise this week and The Gilded Age Season 4 this fall, as well as more White Lotus, Task, and True Detective due in 2027. HBO isn’t actually making less traditional Sunday night TV. It’s just making more TV in total, which isn’t unwelcome at a time when scripted-series counts are in decline.
Of course, if House of the Dragon can teach us anything (doubtful), it’s that crowns can easily slip from their foreheads. Paramount is in the midst of acquiring WBD—well, it might be—and if that merger goes through, HBO could be in line for a CBS-style shake-up. “If WARNAMOUNT happens—HBO, you’re up next on this leadership docket right next to CNN,” The Ankler’s Sean McNulty wrote last month. In November, Bloys insisted he wasn’t worried—but only because worrying wouldn’t help. “A lot of it is out of our hands,” he said.
“The idea that we control the dragons is an illusion,” Viserys Targaryen said in the House of the Dragon series premiere. Maybe Bloys can navigate normal upheaval in the streaming biz, but he can’t control the Ellisons. So something Viserys’s daughter said in the same episode might be even more relevant: “The only thing that could tear down the House of the Dragon was itself.” That might be true of HBO, too.
