It’s like how Peacock paid NBCUniversal $500M for The Office, even though Peacock is owned by NBCUniversal. Or how HBO Max paid Warner Bros $425M for Friends, even though HBO Max is owned by Warner Bros.
If a studio owns a streaming service, how exactly is that streaming service paying that studio for the content? Is the studio just paying itself? How exactly does that work and why do they have to do it?
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Effectively boils down to the fact that subsidiary companies are financially and legally distinct entities from their parent companies. Parent company wants to move cash out of the subsidiary to use for other parts of their business (as others have mentioned, in this case, probably to pay royalties and such, but they also might just want to grow other areas of their business as well). Subsidiary company needs to acquire the legal rights to use parent company’s property. Rather than having two separate entries on the books where both trade these things for nothing in return, it makes more sense to just have the subsidiary pay for the rights.
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