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Variety and Deadline are reporting that some of HBO's other programming, including the World War II shows Band of Brothers and The Pacific, will come to Netflix in the future alongside the drama Six Feet Under and the sports comedy series Ballers starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
WB Discovery, of course, isn't bringing all of its HBO shows to Netflix, especially not its newest ones. HBO's premiere programming, including Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, Succession, The White Lotus, and The Last of Us more recently, remain available to stream exclusively on Max.
Netflix itself confirmed the news about Insecure specifically, releasing a tweet saying that all five seasons of the show, which was created by Issa Rae, are now streaming. There is no word yet on when Band of Brothers, Ballers, and others will appear on Netflix.
WB Discovery is selling some of its HBO TV shows to Netflix to help make more money through licensing deals. It follows the company's partnership with Roku and Tubi for shows like Westworld and FBoy Island. Years earlier, in 2014, HBO and Amazon worked together for a deal covering The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, among others. This happened prior to Amazon's own streaming service taking off in a big way.
I'll be honest: four episodes into Netflix's The Witcher, you still won't be entirely sure what a "Witcher" is. Henry Cavill, who you'll know best as Superman in the DC Comics movies, plays a Witcher, so that's step one. As far as I can tell, though, a Witcher is a kind of monster bounty hunter, but also one who faces personal prejudice based on the fact they're mutants, bred specifically for the act of killing supernatural creepy crawlies.
It's no secret The Witcher is Netflix's play for a Game of Thrones style hit and, in theory, they have all the pieces to the puzzle here. Geralt is a complicated character with a funny wig, the fight scenes are actually brilliant, and the (very expensive) Continent feels lived-in. There's blood, nudity, and no small number of people either rejecting or discovering their destinies.
The problem is, even in a fast-paced show with big ambitions and the budget to back it up, none of this feels very interesting. The Witcher is derivative from start to finish, not just aping Game of Thrones's structure but other, better properties, too. The show is based on a series of Polish novels and a popular video game series, and shares much more in common with the latter. I might be confused as to who some of these people are and why I should care about them, but their episode-to-episode arcs play out like simple game quests in which they must get from A to B. Apart from Geralt and Yennifer of Vengerberg (a great Anya Chalotra), there's not a compelling character to be found in a show that would benefit greatly from operating more explicitly in the grey areas of its morality.
There are certainly strong signs of promise in The Witcher's first season, though. Its deployment of Cavill to serve under the female gaze certainly feels less exploitative than Game of Thrones' extensive forays into sexuality (if you can call it that) and a time-bending twist slowly revealed over the course of the season makes for a more involved watching experience. But the good parts are still too piecemeal to sustain a ten-episode TV show, let alone to justify watching it for hours on end in the hopes it coalesces. If you simply must have some more high fantasy in your life, The Witcher will help fill that void. If, like me, you're already spoiled for choice when it comes to things to watch over the holidays, you might be better off skipping this one.
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Game of Thrones returns for its final season this weekend, as will hordes of HBO Now subscribers who join the streaming service when the hit show premieres. But, as a previous analysis of HBO Now showed, roughly half of the subscriber growth from Game of Thrones season 6 vanished within three months of the finale. Our latest analysis, updated to include season 7 data, found a similar effect around the Game of Thrones premiere. Total HBO Now members jumped by 91 percent in the U.S. during season 7 but, after the finale, total subscribers fell into a decline for six consecutive months.
Although some of those September 2017 memberships may have come from NFL fans signing up at the start of the season, neither the previous nor following football seasons garnered comparable levels of interest from new subscribers. And the January 2019 release of Star Trek: Discovery season 2 helps confirm that Trekkies are behind the boost. Since the premiere, monthly new signups have been up by 82 percent over a typical month in the previous three years.
CBS All Access recently announced new Star Trek content in production: a rebooted Captain Picard with Patrick Stewart reprising his iconic role. The streaming service is banking on the continued loyalty of its Star Trek audience, and rightly so. Analysis of subscribers who joined during the signup spike in September and October 2017 shows that they were, on average, slightly more likely to stick with CBS All Access than subscribers who joined in other months of 2017. Fifty-two percent of season 1 subscribers still held memberships six months later, compared against 44 percent of subscribers from other months in 2017. CBS All Access also offers an annual membership, which was excluded from this analysis.
Game of Thrones fans, however, were less loyal to HBO Now than the average subscriber. Just 26 percent of viewers who made their first payment to HBO Now during Game of Thrones season 7 were still subscribers six months later, while that number was 40 percent among HBO Now signups from other months that year. Price may be one reason viewers drop HBO Now fastest. CBS All Access offers a monthly subscription with limited commercials for just $5.99 per month, while monthly access to HBO Now costs $14.99.
The book was published in 2008 and is already considered one of the great modern sci-fi classics, making many wary that it could be properly adapted into a television show. But Netflix has clearly thrown a bunch of money at the project, and it brought in some established TV veterans in Game of Thrones' David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to run the show. OK, that may just make people even more wary.
The new series is coming to Netflix soon, so we'll try to answer your questions about what you can expect from this book-to-screen adaptation, like when 3 Body Problem premieres, what the show is about, who stars in it, and more.
Netflix has announced that 3 Body Problem will be released on March 21, 2024. The news was announced as part of November's Geeked Week festivities. Previously, Netflix had eyed January for the release date, but no reason has been given for the delay. Strikes affecting post-production? Time-consuming special effects? Aliens? We will never know.
On March 7, just two weeks ahead of launch, Netflix gave us the final trailer, featuring narration from Benedict Wong that attempts to give a general sense of what's going on in this mind-bending series without really getting into the specifics. This one is heavier on vibes than plot, but that seems to par for the course for 3 Body Problem since it's a pretty complicated story to try to sum up.
On Jan. 9, Netflix unleashed a second trailer for the series, and it appears to be the other side of the coin to the first teaser, spending more time in the present-day timeline with Eiza Gonzlez's Auggie Salazar. And because this is an epic sci-fi film made my by two guys, it's all set to a choral version of Radiohead's "Everything in Its Right Place."
On June 17, 2023, during its annual Tudum event, Netflix released the first 3 Body Problem teaser trailer. It's longer than you'd expect for a teaser, coming in at nearly 2 minutes and giving viewers a look at the gorgeous cinematography and stunning visual effects. Other than a narrator waxing philosophical, we don't hear any dialogue between the characters.
During Netflix's Geeked Week in November 2023, the streamer also released a new clip of the show featuring everyone's favorite Maester in training, John Bradley. In it, Bradley's Jack Rooney is checking out some mysterious technology with Jess Hong's Jin, and he enters some sort of virtual reality that feels a lot more reality than virtual.
3 Body Problem will adapt the first book in Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, The Three Body Problem. Presumably, potential subsequent seasons will cover the other two books in the series, The Dark Forest and Death's End.
Netflix's official logline for the series is as follows: "A young woman's fateful decision in 1960s China reverberates across space and time to a group of brilliant scientists in the present day. As the laws of nature unravel before their eyes, five former colleagues reunite to confront the greatest threat in humanity's history." That's an awfully cagey description of what the series is about, so continue if you want more details, or skip to the next section if you'd rather go in blind.
Very slight spoilers for The Three Body Problem follow: The Three Body Problem is an alien invasion story. After a top secret scientific project successfully makes contact with an alien civilization in a nearby star system, the aliens, suffering from their own impending environmental collapse, decide to take over Earth. On our planet, different camps form to welcome the aliens or fight off the invasion.
Game of Thrones co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss enraptured audiences with their take on George R. R. Martin's epic fantasy series A Song of Fire and Ice. Now the duo is back with 3 Body Problem, a new take on a beloved book series, Remembrance of Earth's Past, from Chinese novelist Liu Cixin. Working alongside them is executive producer Alexander Woo, who is also no stranger to bringing a book to the screen, as he was one of the main writers for HBO's True Blood.
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