The streaming wars are continuing to heat up, with both HBO Max and NBCUniversal’s Peacock having recently entered the battle, and the two newest combatants already boast a combined subscriber count of over 15 million despite only being in the game for a matter of weeks.
Based on the whirlwind of recent announcements, all signs point to Warner Bros. relying heavily on their DC output as one of HBO Max’s major selling points, with Zack Snyder’s Justice League, J.J. Abrams’ Justice League Dark and Matt Reeves’ cop show that’s set to act as a companion piece to The Batman all heading exclusively to their in-house platform.
This led a lot of people to wonder what the future held for DC Universe, because there’s little need for the same company to own two separate streaming services that both specialize in comic book output. HBO Max is already co-producing Doom Patrol and Swamp Thing was canceled almost as soon as it hit the air, meaning that content continues to be pretty thin on the ground.
We previously heard that the roster of superhero series were set to migrate to HBO Max, and it looks like this was correct, after Warner Bros. has now started officially changing the names of the shows on social media, with both Titans and Harley Quinn losing their ‘DC Universe’ prefix.
Of course, this news shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given the threadbare lineup of content, with Titans proving much more popular as an internationally-distributed Netflix title than it ever did on DC Universe, as well as reports that the service currently has less than 50,000 paying subscribers. All of the projects in question are virtually guaranteed to find a much bigger audience on HBO Max anyway, so at this point, DC Universe closing down seems like both an inevitable and sensible business decision.
