Viacom is closing on a massive streaming deal for Comedy Central’s animated comedy “South Park,” TheWrap has learned.
The longrunning animated comedy could garner between $450-$500 million for rights to its past episodes, an individual with knowledge of the discussions told TheWrap. The news was first reported by Bloomberg.
“South Park,” from creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, is currently in its 23rd season. It was renewed through Season 26 last month.
HBO Max, Peacock and Hulu, which has held the streaming rights to “South Park” since 2015, are all vying for the series. Hulu’s current deal includes next-day rights to current-season episodes, which means they’re available on Hulu one day after they premiere on Comedy Central. Prior to Hulu, “South Park” streamed on Netflix.
Viacom hopes to reach a new deal by the end of 2019, with an announcement possible as early as next week.
“South Park” would become the latest series to garner a huge amount of cash from streaming services, following the likes of former sitcoms “Friends,” “Seinfeld,” “The Office” and “The Big Bang Theory.” Earlier this week, WarnerMedia said that “The West Wing” would move from Netflix to HBO Max.
Unlike those others, “South Park” is still producing new episodes and will do so for the foreseeable future.
In the next six months Disney, Apple, WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal will all launch their own streaming services to compete with Netflix and others including Hulu and Amazon. Netflix, which paid more than $500 to pry “Seinfeld” from Hulu, is seeing its own content library raided with NBCU pulling “The Office” and WarnerMedia taking back “Friends” for their own streaming offerings.