Well, despite reports last year that Cinemax content would be part of the HBO Max library, WarnerMedia reps stated yesterday that would not happen, at least not on an overall basis.
But they did say that Cinemax will stop making original content. Per the story at
Deadline:
Cinemax will no longer commission original shows as HBO Max gears up for its forthcoming launch.
The HBO sister network will continue to remain as a linear cable channel, which largely airs movies, but the Cinemax brand will not be transferred to the HBO Max service.
So while Cinemax apparently won't die this year, as I had predicted, it looks like it will instead become a zombie channel, kind of what The Movie Channel is to Showtime. (If you didn't realize that The Movie Channel still existed, no one could blame you. But it does. The closest thing it has to a website is
a single page hidden within the larger Showtime site.)
I guess the plan is to essentially spend nothing on Cinemax -- no more original content and probably no marketing. Since it airs the same movies that HBO does, it should cost them next-to-nothing to continue operating. I would expect Cinemax subscribers to continue to plummet but, hey, I guess the few who don't cancel will be pure profit for them.
Maybe they'll eventually shift Cinemax toward airing movies that premiered on HBO/HBO Max several months earlier, kind of like Starz does with their Encore service. But, IMO, that would only make sense if they were able to get Cinemax added back to upper-tier cable channel packages with big carriers like Comcast and Charter, both of which kicked Cinemax out of all their bundles last year. And Comcast has already booted Starz and Encore out of those packages too. So I guess the likeliest scenario is that Cinemax shuffles along as a zombie a la carte premium service that no one cares about until it quietly dies at some point down the road.
