In keeping with the rest of HBO Max’s local and regional executives, as the official voice of one of the global entertainment companies currently at the center of global attention, The platform’s vice president of general entertainment and programming strategy for Latin America, Mariano César, preferred to remain silent and not comment when LA NACION consulted him in the last hours on the sale of Warner Bros. to Netflix.
The fate of HBO Max (one of the most valuable assets of what exists to date Warner Bros. Discovery) is one of the great unknowns behind the multimillion-dollar operation that caused a veritable earthquake in the entertainment industry. If the agreement between Warner and Netflix is approved by US regulators in the coming months, the streaming giant will end up controlling the brand that to date (due to diversity, risk and originality) is considered one of the most significant venues for the production and distribution of online content in global entertainment. There they are, among many others, The sopranos, Curb your enthusiasm, game of Thrones, The Last of Us, Hacks, True detective, The Gilded Age, The Pitt And The White Lotus along with a growing film stock, series and documentaries produced in Latin America and our country.
A few days before official announcement that Netflix paid $82.7 billion to stay with Warner (and therefore HBO and its streaming platform), Caesar spoke along THE NATION on the topic that all major players in the global economy took for granted: Warner was about to change ownership.
“As industry professionals We are surrounded by uncertainty and fear about our next proprietary structure. In the meantime, our leaders want us to focus on the content. And it’s the best we can do,” said the senior local HBO Max exec.
César is one of the most experienced and recognized pay TV professionals in the entire region. He has been in all stages of development in this activity since he began his career 30 years ago at Imagen Satelital as an assistant to the remembered Domingo Di Nubila. In this pioneering company he developed brands such as Uniseries, Retro, I.Sat and Space. Then, in the heyday of cable television, he cycled through TNT and Warner Channel before taking the helm of streaming content division HBO Max in 2021.
“In these three decades I have seen many mergers and acquisitions,” he explains. “Focusing on the outcomes of our content in some ways protects us from corporate noise and the anxiety of knowing what the next chapter of this story will be. That’s what we focus on. Reading scripts and selecting projects.”
– Isn’t this task time-limited at a time of such great changes, when they do not yet know who they will report to in the future? It would make sense if you were given instructions like, “We can come here because we don’t know what the horizon will look like later.”
-No no. Luckily, we have leaders like Casey Bloys and Sarah Aubrey who are as focused on content development as we are. Besides the budget, the most important thing in any production is to give it time and not rush it, especially in the early stages of development. Build any required previous versions and don’t start it until the script is ready.
-Under these very uncertain circumstances, could you further develop an idea with, for example, a three-year forecast?
-We have the very specific instructions that Casey and Sarah sent us. This may result in a series starting production now and by the time it premieres, perhaps that company or platform will have a different name. This is what saves us from fads or short-lived trends.
– So you continue to work in the medium term.
-Of course, because fictional content requires at least three years between the development of the project, production, post-production and localization in different languages.. If you want to spend your time chasing the latest trend, you’ll be late. If you want to respond to the latest company move, you will also be late. This, in a sense, protects us from eventualities and focuses us on the search for quality. We want the content to be engaging while having what sets us apart from our competitors: a unique look and feel for mass.
-What does the panorama of content production (films, series, documentaries, reality shows) of Latin American origin look like in this period of the so-called “streaming battle”?
-The novelty comes from the value of all these creations, confirmed by success in 2025 Chespirito. In addition to being the best-performing Latin American content since the platform’s launch in 2021, this series was also among the top five most viewed worldwide this year, allowing us to attract many new subscribers. During this crucial year, we also achieved a second major success: our original novel Deadly beautymade in Brazil.
–Chespiritoa Brazilian soap opera… We are in the age of streaming and we are talking about names and genres that take us back to free-to-air television.
-This new reality does not mean that things that are so deeply rooted in Latin American DNA, such as melodrama, will change. The way of consumption changes, the devices used to view it change, but there are things that don’t change. It took us a while to review it. We always knew that without fiction we wouldn’t be able to curate Latin American content on our platform. We started with acquired material of Turkish or Spanish origin and now wanted to continue with original productions. This year the time had come Deadly beauty and we bet on a Mexican novel in 2026, collision, with the Argentinian Macarena Achaga as the protagonist.
-In terms of soap operas, Argentina has a great tradition in this genre, although without the size or audience that such large markets as Brazil or Mexico naturally have. Could some kind of Argentinian content emerge there or from another genre that could benefit from this growing interest in Latin American productions in the short or medium term?
-Argentina faces challenges and opportunities. 5 or 10% of our audience represents a different scale, much smaller than Mexico or Brazil. This is a real challenge for monetizing our content. This reality opens up other types of possibilities for us that involve collaboration or co-production with other actors. An example is black widowsoriginal co-production by TNT And flowthe largest pay TV provider in the Argentine market, available to watch worldwide on HBO Max. daisyfrom Cris Morenacame out first Telephone. And at the same time, from the platform we are a window for the exhibition of Telefe formats such as The voice either MasterChef. This forces us to join forces and sometimes give up exclusivity to add partners who make projects possible.
– From this perspective, could one imagine a renaissance in streaming the latest Argentine novel, even with the traditional style of recent times? 100 days to fall in lovewithout going any further, had its remake in Mexico.
-We still need to find the right project and format. And in this we have something in common with Mexico and Brazil. The novel is a typical genre of broadcast television that has found its place in streaming, but without exactly following the original line. So much Final beauty as collision These are novels with 40 episodes. Much longer than a series and at the same time much shorter than traditional novels with 100 episodes or more. This change allows us to put together more limited stories without having to drag out situations or add subplots for production reasons. We are facing a model that Argentina can potentially follow, not in the short term but in the medium term.
– Among the Argentine fictions that HBO Max has announced will premiere in 2026, a novelty appears: Caught. What we know so far is that it is the true case of a young woman who, following her religious calling, entered a cloistered monastery and suffered abuse from the superior. Then he manages to escape and search for justice. What genre or format could we frame it in?
–Caught It is a good example that places Argentina in global trends and allows us to get closer to the audience. It is a series that follows current fashion true crime from real cases. We are already at the end of filming and starting post-production. At the same time, in terms of audiences, 2026 will be a year of second seasons for Latin American productions: Like water for chocolate, daisy, City of God, Máxima, Black Widows. In addition to the expansion of the universe Chespirito with an animated series and a new series in which Don Ramón will be the protagonist. These second seasons speak a lot about the validity of the original ideas.