Hope you hadn’t planned to watch Wonder Woman 1984 with a HBO Max free trial

Maybe it’s time to pay one for the streaming service trial. CNET reports that HBO Max is no longer giving users a free week to watch its content, following the Disney Plus and Netflix examples earlier in the year. This change, probably not by chance, comes a few weeks before December 25, when Wonder Woman 1984 is ready to launch on the service (as well as in theaters, but you should probably stay at home). While it can’t compete with free, the $ 14.99 you’ll now have to pay to see the movie still compares favorably to the price of a theater ticket (and that’s a month of entertainment instead of two o’clock).

It’s not the first streaming service to cancel a free trial before a big release: Disney Plus did so just a few weeks before it started streaming. Hamilton. The logic is sane, even if it’s boring: people want to watch the Big New Thing, and if you offer a free trial, they might just watch it and bounce back. If they have to pay for it for a month, many will, and they might get hooked on something else while they search for other content to justify their month-long subscription. Or, if you’re HBO Max, they might see the absolute deluge of movies coming to the service next year and decide it’s worth sticking around.

So if you were hoping to use the free trial to watch Wonder Woman 1984, this is no longer an option. Is it worth paying a month of HBO Max? You will have to decide, even if you are willing to pay or not, it will probably depend on how many other streaming services you are paying for, as there are definitely a lot of them. As for me, I’m just sad that I have to cancel my plans to have an amazing week watching free movies at the end of next year.