The best thing about HBO Max doesn’t even actually exist yet

• HBO Max is the newest player in the Streaming Wars, launching on Wednesday for $15/month for new subscribers and including 10,000 hours of content to start with.
• One of the most high-profile additions to the streamer, however, won’t actually arrive until 2021.
• That’s when HBO Max will add the long-awaited director’s cut of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, often referred to by fans as the “Snyder Cut.”

HBO Max, the new streaming service from AT&T’s WarnerMedia that executives hope can stand as a credible threat to Netflix, launched with much fanfare on Wednesday and brings subscribers a value proposition that includes 10,000 hours of content right out of the gate. If you’re a new subscriber, the price is a bit steep compared to other streaming products (at $15/month) — but, at the same time, millions of people will have access to HBO Max right away for free, either because they’re already an HBO subscriber or they’re existing AT&T customers. If you’re on AT&T’s best wireless plan, for example, you can get HBO Max at no extra charge (the AT&T Unlimited Elite plan, which includes the new streamer, at $50 per line a month). Additionally, customers who already have HBO through AT&T now have instant access to HBO Max at no extra charge.

Thanks to the launch this week, there’s a ton of content that fans are the most excited about, including the availability of classic TV shows for all audiences like Rick and Morty, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Big Bang Theory, and Sesame Street.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but Fresh Prince is streaming on HBO Max. pic.twitter.com/emZinwktlw

— Brandon Walker (@BWalkerSEC) May 28, 2020

HBO Max is overwhelming and has the potential to dethrone Netflix

— karsten runquist (@RunquistKarsten) May 28, 2020

But one of the best things about HBO Max, fans learned this week, doesn’t arrive on the platform until next year — meaning that, well, it doesn’t actually exist yet.

WarnerMedia chairman Robert Greenblatt was a guest on the Recode Media podcast the day before the HBO Max launch, and he confirmed that, while the long-awaited director’s cut of Zack Snyder’s Justice League is, in fact, coming to HBO Max next year following a viral #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign, Greenblatt explained that it doesn’t actually exist, as such, yet.

“It isn’t as easy as going into the vault, and there’s a Snyder Cut sitting in there to put out,” Greenblatt said. “It does not exist. Zack is actually building it, and it’s complex, including — and I don’t want to get into too much detail that we haven’t already talked about yet — new FX shots. It’s a radical rethinking of that movie, and it’s complicated and wildly expensive.”

It was so complicated, in fact, that Greenblatt adds some of the final hurdles to HBO Max being able to announce the project didn’t actually get cleared until just days before the official announcement. Meantime, Snyder himself added another tantalizing detail to the imminent arrival of the director’s cut, tweeting what appears to be a piece of art related to it on Tuesday:

He's coming… to HBO Max pic.twitter.com/tthWwAqzWp

— Zack Snyder (@ZackSnyder) May 27, 2020