WarnerMedia Creates HBO MAX?
There’s HBO Go, HBO Now, and soon, there will be HBO Max. For WarnerMedia and parent company AT&T, the latter is most important, as it will become the subscription video service that they position against Netflix, Hulu, the upcoming Disney+, and a range of other paid video offerings. “Anchored with and inspired by the legacy of HBO’s excellence and award-winning storytelling, the new service will be ‘Maximized’ with an extensive collection of exclusive original programming (Max Originals) and the best-of-the-best from WarnerMedia’s enormous portfolio of beloved brands and libraries,” the company wrote in a press release today. (The emphasis there is from WarnerMedia, of course.) So you’ll get all the stuff you’d expect from having HBO — TV series, on-demand movies, watching some primetime HBO shows live — plus a huge serving of content from basically every other WarnerMedia property. More relevant to you is that WarnerMedia also confirmed that HBO Max will have exclusive streaming rights to every episode of Friends when it launches in spring 2020; that’ll be after the hugely popular sitcom departs Netflix. Friends is set to leave in 2019, so there might be a gap where the show disappears from streaming altogether until HBO Max’s debut. The same exclusivity deal will be true for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Pretty Little Liars, which will stream all episodes on Max. HBO Max also gets dibs on a couple of shows from The CW, including Batwoman and Katy Keene, a Riverdale spinoff. Greg Berlanti and Reese Witherspoon have signed on to produce original films for HBO Max as well. The service will feature content from “Warner Bros., New Line, DC Entertainment, CNN, TNT, TBS, truTV, The CW, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Crunchyroll, Rooster Teeth, Looney Tunes, and more.”
Chris Rock is Making a New Saw?
Samuel L. Jackson reportedly has joined the cast of the “Saw” reboot. Jackson is set to play Chris Rock’s father in the latest iteration from the Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures horror franchise, Deadline reports. Rock is also producing the film and helped devise the story, with a script by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg. Production has begun in Toronto. Jackson, known as one of Hollywood’s hardest working men, stars in three films this summer. In the “Saw” reboot, Rock plays a police detective who sets out to investigate some gnarly crimes. Max Minghella plays William Schenk, Rock’s partner, and Marisol Nichols plays Capt. Angie Garza, Rock’s boss. The latest “Saw” will be directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, who directed three of seven films in the franchise. It’s scheduled to release on October 23, 2020.
Prequel to Game of Thrones
Ready for some new info about HBO’s mysterious Game of Thrones prequel series? EW recently spoke to author and executive producer George R.R. Martin about showrunner Jane Goldman’s pilot, which is currently filming in Northern Ireland. HBO and Martin have previously revealed the show takes place roughly 5,000 years before the events in Game of Thrones, when Westeros was a very different place, and leads up to an epic confrontation with the White Walkers known as The Long Night. Since some fans have been concerned that the show is pre-Targaryen (and therefore pre-dragon), we asked Martin what are some families and creatures that are around during this time period. Martin gave some intriguing hints about the state of Westeros during this time period, and even noted a possible new title.
Kanye West Is Creating Star Wars Looking Homes
The rapper and entrepreneur apparently has an upcoming meeting in San Francisco with potential investors. Forget a galaxy far, far away, Kanye West is getting work done right here, right now in his reported development of low-income housing units inspired by Star Wars architecture. According to a Forbes cover story interview recently published, the rapper, designer and entrepreneur is in the midst of creating housing units that resemble what Luke Skywalker lived in on Tatooine in 1977’s A New Hope. No picture of the units was provided, but Forbes‘ Zack O’Malley Greenburg accompanied West to a clearing in the middle of the California woods (specific location not given) where model structures of the Tatooine units are being designed and constructed. “Inspired by Luke Skywalker’s childhood home, West has been working with a team to design prefabricated structures that sport the same austere aesthetic, with the goal of deploying them as low-income housing units,” Greenburg writes. “He tells me they could be used as living spaces for the homeless, perhaps sunk into the ground with light filtering in through the top.”
