Hulu has 20 million subscribers and a bona fide awards darling in its Emmy-dominating “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but not all is well with the streaming service. After losing a whopping $920 million last year, the company is on track to nearly double that in 2018 by going $1.5 billion in the red. You may ask how such a large enterprise can get by without actually making money, but that’s for the fat cats lining their pockets to know and mere peasants like us to find out.
Those numbers are according to an SEC filing from Comcast, which owns 30 percent of the service that allows us all to indulge in such shows as “Castle Rock” and “The Looming Tower”; with Hulu having lost $353.3 million during the second quarter of this annus horribilis and $436 million the quarter before that, a bit of math gives us the princely figure of $1.5 billion.
Hulu received a total of 27 Emmy nominations last month, 20 of which went to “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The drama, now in its second season and based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, won last year’s awards for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Lead Actress (Elisabeth Moss) in addition to six other prizes.
Disney and Fox also own 30 percent of the company, and with the latter about the subsume the former, nearly two-thirds of Hulu will soon go to Disney.
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