Warner Bros. has been going through a lot of changes since being acquired by Discovery and, for the most part, they haven't been good. The studio currently seems to be in disarray, but making money is CEO David Zaslav's top priority.
That includes no longer holding on so tightly to the franchises it owns, including The Lord of the Rings. The Hollywood Reporter explains that the movies had been locked up exclusively for streaming purposes on HBO Max, but there's a good reason you might have seen them elsewhere lately...on a nonexclusive basis, of course.
"We have a ton of content that has been sitting idly for just purely principle reasons," Warner Bros. Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said at a recent event. "The Lord of the Rings is a great [example]: It is a nonexclusive window [and] we look at it as what we are giving up versus what additional revenue we are generating."
Now, rather than leaving them "sitting idly," the company has been able to make a killing in licensing revenue after Amazon purchased the rights to stream them prior to the launch of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV series.
That's not the only franchise Warner Bros. Discovery is monetizing, however.
We recently learned that HBO Max will no longer stream the Batman: Caped Crusader animated series, prompting Bruce Timm, J.J. Abrams, and Matt Reeves to take the show on the road and pitch it to major streamers. Like Batgirl, Zaslav clearly didn't view the show as a major draw for subscribers and would rather earn big bucks from another platform buying it from them.
The trade reports that Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu are the current contenders to acquire Batman: Caped Crusader, so expect to eventually see it on one of those. Batman is a massively popular IP, so you can imagine how keen a streamer would be to have a new animated series like this exclusively on its platform.
Stay tuned for updates on the show as we have them.