HBO Max has taken a group of media to London, including WorldOfSoftware, so they can learn about first-hand and in the mouth of Casey Bloys, CEO of the platform, its plans for 2026. Of course, the inevitable question was in the air: how can we make plans for 2026 if in the coming weeks, before the end of 2025, we could learn that Warner has new owners. Paramount or Netflix are some of the first bidders for the veteran giant, branched into dozens of entertainment and information channels.
However, Bloys has been clear: he knows nothing about it (of course, we have asked him directly if he could say anything about it) and it is not his job to manage these types of operations either. What’s more: “they are decisions that do not affect our budgets. (…) The only thing we can control, the only thing we can do, the best we can do, is to continue making plans like this one for 2026. Furthermore, in this business we work about two years in advance. So, right now, we are preparing for 2027 and 2028.” That is, it is too early to know what impact a purchase would have on programming.
And Bloys does not speak into a vacuum: tonight in London we have seen about twenty productions that will premiere in 2026, and the truth is that There are titles that aim to boast a quality that is absolutely beyond any doubt.and with the variety of styles and textures that the platform usually boasts: from the superheroic and violent procedural of ‘Lanterns’ to the late and sordid return of ‘Euphoria’, through new proposals as stimulating as the fourth season of ‘Industry’ or the promising ‘DTF St. Louis’.
The first thing Bloys has done has been to set the record straight regarding the return of the platform’s traditional name, allowing this year for HBO to appear alongside Max again: “We have brought HBO back back knowing that HBO Max clearly signals that we are the destination for extraordinary voices, different perspectives and narratives for mature audiences. For more than 50 years, this is what HBO has always been and continues to be.”
Bloys has boasted million-dollar milestones, but also prestige: ‘Task’ has added 12.6 million viewers per episode globally and ‘It: Welcome to Derry’, 15.4. This summer, ‘Chespirito’ was the most viewed Latin American product in the history of the platform. In the last decade alone, HBO Max has won eight Emmys for Best Drama, four for comedy, seven for limited series and 13 for documentary, and last year it added more nominations than ever before in the life of HBO Max. The platform, in short, has grown by 20 million users in the last year.
With all these figures ahead, it is normal for Warner to boast of being a purchase with an attractive catalog for other platforms, but it does not seem to be stepping on the brakes at the moment. Bloys has detailed some of the upcoming releases and the truth is that some of them have a great track. Let’s look at some of the most notable ones.
old acquaintances
We have had no news about the new season of ‘House of the Dragon’, but we have had news about a new spin-off of ‘Game of Thrones’: from ‘The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ we have seen a new trailer and the truth is that it looks better and better. We will talk about her in more detail in the coming days, since we have had the opportunity to speak with her showrunnerbut from its progress we are left with its curious mixture of humor and the dirty and violent aesthetics of George RR Martin’s creation. There is death and darkness but also gags worthy of a sitcom and parodies that sometimes seem like a medieval ‘Top Secret’.
The return of ‘Euphoria’ is also highly anticipated. Its creator Sam Levinson made an appearance in the room, joking with Bloys about how they couldn’t take the characters back to high school after so long, “even though there are other series with thirty-year-old high school students,” in an undisguised jab at ‘Stranger Things’. Bloys has defined ‘Euphoria’ as the current television series with the most powerful cast of stars, and the truth is that since its creation, Zendaya, Sidney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi and Colman Domingo have become leading performers. Levinson states that “it is very nice to see how they win awards, the careers they develop over time.”
Lanterns
They are not the only ones: the return of ‘Industria’ with a fourth season has also been discussed, we have seen a frenetic trailer for the second season of ‘The Pitt’, which is arriving right now and which promises, at least, the same tension and a good pan of viscera. And beware, ‘Stuart Fails to Save the Universe’, a spin-off of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ starring, in an environment of multidimensional chaos, the owner of the comic book store from the original series. As Bloys says, “a show that Sheldon and Leonard would watch.”
Although the most peculiar and most anticipated return has been the third season of ‘The Comeback’, twenty years after the first season and ten after the second, and where Lisa Kudrow (the unforgettable Phoebe from ‘Friends’) and the original creator Michael Patrick King (producer of ‘Sex and the City’) return. In this new satire of the world of series that comes at a sweet time for audiovisual satires after the triumph of ‘The Studio’, the fallen star played by Kudrow will face the threat of AI… but without science fiction elements.
Casey Bloys
New passions
The truth is that What has caught our attention the most and best have been the new series. For example, ‘DTF St. Louis’ is a limited series about a love triangle between three adults (Jason Bateman, David Harbor and Linda Cardellini) that begins as a clumsy way of managing a midlife crisis and ends with one of them dead. Or it’s just beginning.
Or ‘Rooster’, the latest from Steve Carell, with a comedy centered on a writer lost in university environments while trying to restore a broken relationship with his daughter. In a completely different vein, the Italian ‘Portobello’ has caught our attention, in which a fateful and real ruling by the justice of that country is described, when a very famous television presenter was unjustly accused of belonging to the mafia. ‘Half Man’ also looks great, in which Jamie Bell and Richard Gadd are two lifelong friends, and we will explore their conflictive relationship, full of ups, downs and unexpected surprises since they met as teenagers.
Although one of the highlights of the night was a new look at ‘Lanterns’, which unfortunately was not accompanied by the presence of James Gunn or a similar figure, such as comic producer and writer Tom King. We liked the progress we have seen su surly, frontier police tone without special effectsand which reaffirms Warner’s desire to propose a superhero universe with individual characters and aimed at a mature audience.
We don’t know if we will ever see Batman series on Netflix, but for now we have what we have: a very promising 2026 for HBO Max.
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