New York (CNN) Warner Bros. Discovery filed a lawsuit against Paramount Friday and claimed the competing media outlet breached its half-billion-dollar exclusivity deal with HBO Max by airing “South Park” on his own streaming platform, Paramount+.
HBO Max is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery, which also owns CNN.
Almost all South Park episodes air first on Paramount-owned Comedy Central. In 2019, Paramount and the creators of “South Park” joined forces auctioned streaming rights for the show’s first 23 seasons plus three new 10-episode seasons to HBO Max.
Prior to Discovery’s merger with Warner Bros. in 2022, WarnerMedia, then owned by AT&T, agreed to pay nearly $1.7 million for exclusive streaming rights to each “South Park” episode, the lawsuit alleges. The first episodes of “South Park” season 24 are scheduled to air in March 2020. Then came the pandemic, and WarnerMedia was told it was halting new production of “South Park,” the complaint said.
March 2021 Paramount launched Paramount+, and Warner Bros. Discovery claims that Paramount, MTV and South Park Digital Studios jointly “planned to redirect as much of the new ‘South Park’ content as possible to Paramount+ to promote this burgeoning streaming platform.”
The company also said it was promised 30 new episodes over three seasons, but has only received 14 episodes so far.
“We believe that Paramount and South Park Digital Studios have embarked on a multi-year program of unfair trading practices and deception in flagrant and repeated violations of our contract, which clearly grants HBO Max the exclusive streaming rights to the existing library and new content of the popular animated comedy South Park,” HBO Max said in a statement.
Paramount says these claims are “baseless.”
Paramount “continues to honor the parties’ contract by delivering new South Park episodes to HBO Max, although Warner Bros. Discovery has failed and refused to pay royalties it owes Paramount for episodes already delivered, and the HBO Max continues to stream,” said a spokesman for Paramount Global.
The lawsuit, which was filed in the New York State Supreme Court, also calls for a separate A $900 million deal between MTV, a Paramount subsidiary, and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone broke terms in August 2021. This deal included 14 made-for-streaming “South Park” Movies that would premiere on Paramount+.
Warner Bros. Discovery alleges the defendants used terms such as “movies,” “movies,” and “events” to circumvent their contractual obligations.
“As Stone put it publicly, ‘We’ve got money for you now,'” he alleges in the lawsuit, in reference to the deal with MTV.