That’s All, Folks! HBO Max Removes Hundreds Episodes of ‘Looney Tunes’ and ‘The Flintstones’ as Cost-Cutting Blitz Continues

As Bugs Bunny would say, “That’s all, folks!” HBO Max welcomed the new year with the removal of the cartoon classics Looney Tunes and The Flintstones as part of their highly-criticized Warner Bros. Discovery merger. The streamer removed Seasons 16-31 of Looney Tunes and Seasons 4-6 of The Flintstones on Sat., Dec. 31, Variety confirmed.

This change comes with good news and bad news: the good news is that episodes of both programs still remain on the streaming giant.

The first fifteen seasons of Looney Tunes are currently available to stream on HBO Max, totaling 225 shorts dating back to 1930. (Vulture reports that the removed shorts were from 1950-2004.) And, when it comes to the Hanna-Barbera animated sitcom, the first three seasons are still available on the streamer, totaling 88 episodes.

In addition to Looney Tunes, the streamer hosts several spin-off series including The Looney Tunes Show, New Looney Tunes and the HBO Max Original Looney Tunes Cartoons.

Now, the bad news: the future of the removed episodes is unclear as HBO Max’s licensing agreements for the two programs expired at the end of 2022 without renewal, per Vulture. The episode removals were first reported by the Twitter account The Cartoon News, who stated that the episodes were “removed temporarily due to a maintenance check to fix the photoshop titles.”

Vulture later reported that HBO Max did not disclose plans for the remainder of the Looney Tunes episodes. There have been no further comments on The Flintstones.

The Cartoon News, appearing on Twitter with a verification because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue, issued a statement after the publication of their inaccurate reporting in Variety. The account wrote, “Also, since we know we got featured in the Variety’s article, we did not mean to spread any misinformation or cause harm, we just thought it was a technical issue since some have contacted the HBO Max team about it. Sorry!”

While it seems that the shows’ removal from HBO Max is due to licensing rather than cost-cutting, this is not the first time HBO Max has removed programs from their service following parent company WarnerMedia’s merger with Discovery earlier this year. Several shows have been canceled as a result, including Gordita Chronicles, Minx and Made For Love, and content has been removed from the platform, credited to tax break reasons.

In a report from December, Warner Bros. Discovery said they expect to incur between $2.8 and $3.5 billion as a result of content impairment and development write-offs, which many suspected was the company’s strategy following the cancellation of the nearly finished DC movie Batgirl, which elicited scrutiny from the movie’s creators and the online community.

Better get to streaming those classics while you can as HBO Max has proven themselves not to be a reliable home for fan-favorite programs. Just last week, Games of Thrones author George R.R. Martin claimed several of his projects were being shelved by the streamer, despite the success of House of the Dragon, as a result of “changes at HBO Max.”