HBO and Max (wisely) embrace the power of franchise IP. This year, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the third live-action TV series set in the Game of Thrones universe, will premiere on HBO, following 2019’s Watchmen and last year’s The Penguin and Dune: Prophecy. It will also precede more IP-fueled forays such as The Last Of Us Season 2, It: Welcome to Derry, and a Harry Potter reboot. But before you bemoan its perceived lack of originality, remember that no network shepherds new-to-screen concepts from complete obscurity to cultural agenda setter more adeptly. No modern example illustrates this better than The White Lotus, which reflects HBO’s ability to shape and define burgeoning genres.
Blockbuster films often debut to huge opening weekends before routinely (and infamously) seeing ticket sales drop by more than 50 percent. Television usually works inversely, growing its audience over time. Doing so requires quality storytelling, strategic marketing and organic word-of-mouth—especially for original concepts unfamiliar to audiences.
In the case of The White Lotus, HBO partnered with the Four Seasons, where each season is filmed, to provide immersive, themed luxury treatments and experiences to resort guests. The network also teamed up with and American Express to offer travel packages based on the show. These collaborations helped not only build the series fandom but attract new viewers.
In 2021, The White Lotus premiered to just 420,000 live and same-day viewers. Earlier this year, Season 3 debuted to 2.4 million live and same-day viewers. Season 1 averaged 7 million viewers in the live + 7 day window; Season 2 averaged upwards of 10 million.
The White Lotus taps into a collective cultural consciousness
This impressive growth from such a deliberately esoteric series seems inexplicable at first glance. Sure, The White Lotus is critically acclaimed. But it’s also slow-paced, tackles heavy themes, and relies almost entirely on character development outside of each season’s opening murder mystery. I love these elements. But they also make The White Lotus a far more challenging watch than more easily digestible TV hits.
Yet, it’s ascended from niche critical darling to appointment viewing by tapping into the cultural consciousness. Recent years have seen an explosion in scripted wealth porn, or shows and films depicting envy-inducing wealth in distinct ways: eat the rich, indulge the rich, marvel/seethe at the rich. Lavish luxury can be escapist and aspirational while also kindling resentment. It’s a formula The White Lotus weaponizes well.
These titles explore upstairs-downstairs dynamics and how growing socioeconomic divides shape individual lives and society. Billions, Succession, Nine Perfect Strangers, Acapulco, the Dynasty reboot, Parasite, The Morning Show, Severance, Schitt’s Creek—the 21st century abounds with class divide, financial concerns, material-driven lifestyles and corporate maleficence. These titles all revolve around an increasingly unattainable American dream fueling unchecked greed that infects and dismantles our moral foundations. While all have their strengths, The White Lotus stands out distinctively.
The White Lotus deploys a conventional murder-mystery as a more broad appeal hook to “Trojan’s horse” deeper themes to its viewers, as Severance’s Rickon would say. It fuses comedy, drama, thriller and luxury in off-kilter ways that creates fascinating edge-of-your-seat TV. While many wealth porn titles blend genres, few balance humor and dramatic absurdity as effectively. Can any other series wring laughs out of a deadly Jennifer Coolidge shootout? At its best, the series feels like a karmic ticking time bomb.
The show is a testament to HBO’s ability (and creator Mike White’s vision) to create and nurture successful concepts that aren’t based on pre-established familiar IP. Succession, Euphoria, Insecure, True Detective, Barry, The Righteous Gemstones, Big Little Lies, Mare of Easttown, The Undoing, The Gilded Age—all of these recent-ish HBO originals grew into critical successes, ratings wins or both. HBO/Max CEO Casey Bloys and his team don’t just identify buzzy originals; they cultivate series that transcend coastal critic circles to penetrate the mainstream. (This becomes especially effective when a series like The White Lotus crests a new sub-genre wave). That’s arguably the most valuable skill in an era ruled by Hollywood studios recycling their own libraries over and over.
Translating cultural impact into business value
Just as The White Lotus is a melting pot of several tones and styles, it’s also able to deliver value in a multitude of ways. It isn’t a successful series solely because it’s good; it’s successful because of how it contributes measurable success to its platform.
When Season 2 aired from October 2022 to January 2023, the show made Nielsen’s weekly U.S. Top 10 Acquired Series streaming list (a notoriously difficult top 10 to break into) seven times, accumulating at least 60.5 million hours of viewership in that time. This streaming performance easily topped recent franchise shows like The Penguin and Dune: Prophecy. But value in the multifaceted streaming era goes far beyond raw viewership.
Between Q3 2021 and Q4 2024, The White Lotus contributed nearly $120 million to HBO Max/Max in measured subscriber revenue, according to Parrot Analytics. It’s not as huge as mainstream hits like The Mandalorian (about $1 billion) but still impressive for its category (Queen Charlotte, the Bridgerton spinoff, generated around $100 million). As a nuanced examination of wealth, relationships and cultural identity, the show has a more focused audience than a four-quadrant family-friendly offering. It parlayed organic word-of-mouth buzz from a critically acclaimed first season into a more commercially robust second season, which took the action to Sicily and introduced new themes around sexual power dynamics. Season 2 saw an uptick in acquiring new subscribers, underscoring how artistic risk (and a starry ensemble cast) can help drive growth.
Still, not every HBO original can be Game of Thrones; The White Lotus has contributed the majority of its value over its lifetime by retaining existing Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) streaming subscribers, per Parrot (ditto for Succession).
The series generates most revenue from the U.S. and Canada (UCAN). However, as this region bumps up against a subscriber saturation ceiling, the show is driving more acquisition in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market. WBD’s November launch of Max in Asia Pacific (APC) opens another market for The White Lotus to engage audiences with its Thailand-set third season—potentially spurring new subscriber growth.
Familiar IP sells more easily to audiences who are willing to invest time in content they already enjoy. But not every new show can be a prequel, sequel, reboot, revival or spin-off of a pre-established hit. Original and new-to-screen concepts remain vital, despite increasing challenges.
HBO continues to deliver compelling series that often position themselves at the center of rising genres (its ability to elevate genre storytelling, such as comic book material, is worthy of its own column). By addressing the timely concerns of consumers and providing a touch of class warfare wish fulfillment, The White Lotus proves again that atypical and commercially successful are not mutually exclusive. In doing so, it provides a blueprint for multi-season series to maintain quality while delivering business results in a challenging original programming marketplace. Or, at the very least, hold down the fort in between Game of Thrones spinoffs.
