And the best-performing local original production, or LOP, for Warner Bros. Discovery‘s Max, soon-to-be-rebranded as HBO Max, globally is… drum roll, please… Turkish satire series The Prince (Prens).
On Friday, the final episode of the third season of the hit series became available and seems to have helped seal the deal, according to company data.
Starring Giray Altınok as the Prince, the show is “set in the imaginary kingdom of Bongomia and follows the comedic adventures of the prince, a very unpopular member of the kingdom whose own family didn’t even bother to give him a name,” according to a synopsis.
Over the last month, the Turkish Max original achieved “the highest level of engagement of any Max local original production globally,” with 74 percent of subscribers in the country tuning into it, according to WBD.
Over the same period, The Prince proved to be a key driver for new subscribers, becoming “the first show that almost three in four (73 percent) of new Max users watched – the highest nominal acquisition volume for a local original production” in a country in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, company data shows.
During its finale week, season 3 of The Prince accounted for 72 percent of all viewing on Max in Türkiye, WBD said, adding: “The final episode (season 3 episode 8), released just three days ago, became the most viewed episode of the week with 54 percent of total viewers already having watched the finale.”
Deniz Şaşmaz Oflaz
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery
WBD’s transition of its streaming service BluTV to Max in Turkey became official in mid-April as the Hollywood giant underlined its “commitment to increasing its investment in local content” and “bringing a compelling slate of new local stories” to its streamer in the country.
“The response to Prens just shows how strong the demand for high-quality, locally produced originals is and highlights Max as the home of this type of content,” Deniz Şaşmaz Oflaz, vp of local original productions, local channels and streaming operations lead for Türkiye, tells THR. “As one of our first original series since launching the platform direct-to-consumer in Türkiye earlier this year, it’s exciting to see Prens playing a key role in attracting new viewers to the platform.”
In a recent THR interview, she described the series this way: “It looks like a comedy, but it’s more of a dramedy. … The lead character is the prince, who doesn’t want to be on the throne and is not really that smart. And then we see all these typical things happening in this kingdom that we’ve been seeing in such series as Game of Thrones. So it’s a satire.”