HBO

Warner Bros. Discovery announced a 2025 split into two separate companies — one housing the studio and HBO/streaming assets, the other its cable networks — reorganizing the corporate scaffolding around a network that's still produced some of the decade's biggest cultural moments: The White Lotus's third season became a genuine water-cooler event in 2025, The Last of Us's second season drew a more divided response over its deliberate, slow-burn pacing choices, and House of the Dragon continues extending the Game of Thrones universe following Succession's acclaimed 2023 finale as the prestige-drama high point of the post-Thrones era.

Our take: HBO's "less but better" philosophy is still the correct counter-programming to Netflix's volume strategy — The White Lotus proves a single anthology series released once every year or two can dominate the conversation in a way ten mediocre Netflix originals can't — but the corporate split is a real risk to that model if it ends up starving HBO's production budgets to make the spinoff companies' balance sheets look cleaner for investors.

Watch how the post-split company treats greenlights for anything as creatively risky as The Last of Us's slower second season — a leaner, investor-pressured HBO might not keep funding shows willing to alienate part of their audience for an artistic choice, and that risk tolerance has always been the actual source of HBO's prestige.