Lost in last week’s surprise shelving of the $90 million Batgirl and other movies at HBO Max was this: celebrating the summer 2023 merger of HBO Max and Discovery+ into a single app platform, Warner Bros. Discovery has thrown an internal gender reveal party.
The result? HBO Max is for men; Discovery+ is for women. Seems like a combo name for the merged service would be the more pressing issue (may we suggest HBODiscoMax+?), but the WBD executives have other priorities.
A slide deck presentation bullet-pointed that HBO Max programming is mostly “scripted,” while Discovery+ goes “unscripted.” Also, HBO Max deals in “appointment viewing,” whereas Discovery+ is all about “comfort viewing.” These make sense, but we’re not sure what to make of HBO Max’s “fandoms” versus Discovery+’s “genredoms.”
At the top of each list were “male skew” (HBO Max) and “female skew” (Discovery+). So, no men are into the Discovery+ 90 Day Fiancé universe? Women are averse to women-led HBO Max hits like The Flight Attendant and Hacks?
We don’t buy it, so we polled over 500 people about the “gender biases” of HBO Max and Discovery+. The survey results confirmed our suspicions: the male/female preference lines are blurrier than Warner Bros. Discovery thinks. And also hard-line binary, which is a whole other issue.
| Do you agree that HBO Max has a male skew? | % |
|---|---|
| Yes, I agree that HBO Max has a male skew | 44% |
| No, I don’t agree that HBO Max has a male skew | 56% |
| Do you agree that Discovery+ has a female skew? | % |
|---|---|
| Yes, I agree that Discovery+ has a female skew | 36% |
| No, I don’t agree that Discovery+ has a female skew | 64% |
Methodology
We asked 550 (261 male and 289 female) Americans if they agreed with Warner Bros. Discovery’s recent statement that HBO Max skews towards men and Discovery+ skews towards women. The results were then weighted to represent census data for gender and age.
