Dune made enough money from ticket sales to be profitable.
But aside from that, HBO is owned by Warner Brothers. HBO/WB got to use marquee content to drive subscriptions on their HBO Max service. I’m sure there was a substantial fee paid somewhere for that privilege that the movie’s producers got a cut of.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-dune-could-perform-at-the-box-office-boost-max-2021-10
Theoretically, if you have these movies on your streaming service, and that convinces someone to sign up for a subscription, that‘s where you make your money. HBO Max was a new streaming service, so getting people to sign up was a priority.
Without looking at Warner‘s financials, we don’t know that they did make money. They stopped doing concurrent releases, so I suspect it wasn‘t that profitable. It may have just been an experiment that didn’t pan out, or it was the best option Warner had when people weren’t going to the theaters.
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