Here’s A Reminder That ‘South Park’ Is Leaving Max in 2025

Next year, Paramount+ will pull ahead of Max in the ongoing dispute over the exclusive streaming rights to South Park. Paramount must have cut a deal with Pi-Pi and ManBearPig.

Back in 2019, the company then-known as WarnerMedia closed a $500 million deal with what was about to become ViacomCBS that secured the rights to stream the vast, billion-dollar-valued South Park content catalog on HBO Max until 2025, and WarnerMedia believed themselves to be the new, exclusive streaming home of South Park. Then, when ViacomCBS became Paramount Global and launched their own streaming service Paramount+ in 2021, the company utilized some loophole language in the contract (according to the legal representatives of what was about to become Warner Bros. Discovery) to stream new South Park content, thus launching a protracted legal battle between the ever-merging mega-corporations that has seemingly died down since a judge dismissed WBD’s central claim in November of last year.

If that entire legal saga seems confusing, wasteful and pointless, that’s because it was — but the result is perfectly clear. When South Park’s contract with Max ends in 2025, Paramount+ will take over the entire catalog of South Park episodes, specials and movies, including new content, in apparent perpetuity.

I feel like I’ve had one too many popsicles.

Though South Park fans don’t yet know exactly when in 2025 the streaming platform migration will occur, the transition isn’t exactly new information. Since WBD hasn’t renewed the contract that WarnerMedia inked pre-merger in 2019, the termination of the original deal legally and logically means the end of South Park on Max. However, since Paramount Global hasn’t started bombarding our algorithms with ads bragging about the massive South Park catalog they’re about to start streaming, we can safely assume that this isn’t going to be some New Year’s Eve countdown situation where, once the ball drops in Times Square, so does every South Park season on Paramount+.

Still, some South Park fans feel that Max and WBD CEO David Zaslav are, once again, pulling the rug out from under their subscribers. In a thread discussing SlashFilm's recent breakdown of the South Park streaming situation that hit the front page of the South Park subreddit, fans lamented the continued convoluting of TV streaming along with Max’s decline in quality. “Only reason I had Max for the most part,” one fan said of the expiring streaming deal.

“It was honestly just a matter of time,” another user pointed out.

A different fan was thankful that, after years of having to switch in between services to access old content and new specials, Paramount+ will finally consolidate the South Park catalog on a single service. “I have both Paramount Plus and Max. Personally, I’m just glad it’s finally being resolved and their content will be in one place. I’m tired of switching back and forth between platforms,” the optimist opined.

Of course, if Paramount Global ever undergoes yet another mega-merger, South Park fans might as well put their trunks on and prepare to swim in streaming piss.