In one of the most dramatic cuts yet in Warner Bros. Discovery's ongoing quest to reduce $3.5 billion in costs, the heavily indebted conglomerate announced that not only will Westworld, once one of HBO's flagship original series, not get a fifth season, it will be taken off the HBO Max streaming platform altogether.
As WBD looks to save money on royalties and residuals, the Joss Whedon series The Nevers will also be taken down from the subscription streaming platform. The news was first reported by the Penske showbiz trade monopoly (Variety, Deadline, Indiewire) and confirmed by a few outside outlets.
A timeline as to specifically when these shows will go away was not revealed. Both shows will still run on HBO's linear feed.
Also read: Why HBO Max Returned, Hat in Hand, to Amazon Channels (Bloom)
WBD CEO David Zaslav and his management team, which took over for the newly merged WarnerMedia and Discovery earlier this year, faced criticism over the summer when they similarly buried Batgirl, a nearly completed film with a reported $90 million production budget that was intended to debut on HBO Max.
But the banishment of two series that had already debuted on HBO Max seems even more austere.
The Nevers, a Victorian-themed sci-fi drama starring Laura Donnelly and Ann Skelly, debuted the first six episodes of its 12-installment first season in April 2021.
Westworld, which starred Evan Rachel Wood and Ed Harris in a reboot of the 1973 Yul Brynner movie classic about robots in a Western frontier-themed adult amusement park breaking sentient and bad, was nominated for 54 Emmy Awards, winning nine prestigious trophies, from 2017 - 2020.
The erstwhile WarnerMedia, operated by AT&T pre-spinoff, spent luxuriously on promotional advertising to get many of those award nominations for Westworld during that period.
With WBD adopting an "arms dealer" posture, prioritizing the monetization of its content vs. sheer scale expansion of its streaming platforms, expect to see all four seasons of Westworld and all completed episodes of The Nevers emerge on a rival SVOD or FAST platform at some point down the road.
But there could be an expanse of time during which transactional video-on-demand remains the only (pricey) way to stream these shows in the U.S. So if you were curious about either series, stream it now while you can.
During WBD's third-quarter earnings call in November, Zaslav said that HBO and HBO Max Chairman and CEO Casey Bloys has carefully reviewed each HBO series, and that viewers generally aren't watching what WBD is taking off the platform.
"All those write offs that we took shows off these platforms -- we didn't take one show off a platform that was going to help us in any way," Zaslav said. "Is it going to help us to get it off the platform so that we could now invest with the knowledge of what is working and replace those shows with content that has a chance to be more successful, have larger, larger audience? And where are we allocating the capital? How much should we be spending on HBO? How much more investment should we be making at Warner Bros. Television. And in the end, we're fully committed to content. You'll see that."
We just won't be able to see Westworld anymore.
