HBO is getting out of the skin game on its naughty sister channel, Cinemax, and swinging into action.
A serious revamp of Cinemax — the pay cable channel so well-known for its late-night, soft-core series like “Pleasure Cove” and “Co-ed Confidential” that fans dubbed it “Skinemax” — has quietly been underway since last fall, The Post has learned.
Late last week, the 30-year-old movie channel announced its first-ever primetime series, “Strike Back,” a frenetic action series about a two-fisted secret agent for the U.S. who teams up with a British military unit to fight terrorist groups.
What was not announced was that Cinemax has completed a deal to make a TV series based on “The Transporter” movies — and was deep in talks with at least three other big-name movie producers to create original action series, according to sources.
The move to give the channel a new identity is at least tacit recognition that Hollywood movies can no longer carry pay TV.
Channels like HBO and Showtime are, at best, the fourth stop in the Hollywood food chain for movies — after the theater, DVDs and pay-per-view — having long lost that special, new-car smell when they end up on cable TV.
Re-creating Cinemax as a channel for tire-squealing shoot-’em-ups — with a good measure of sex thrown in, of course — is one of the few ways HBO can expand.
MTV did something similar in the 1990s when it banished “Behind the Music” retreads from its sister operation, VH1, and began to create new reality shows for it.
(In fact, the move was so successful that — until “Jersey Shore” really — VH1 overshadowed, and outrated, MTV with shows like “Flavor of Love” and “Rock of Love.”)
The popular adult fare Cinemax has been known for will not be dropped. It will still appear in the late-night hours where it’s been shown for years.
But HBO hopes it can begin to create a new identity for the channel that goes beyond “Hotel Erotica” and “Bikini Frankenstein.”
To keep costs down, HBO is either producing its new slate with partners — the cost of making “Strike Back” is being split with the British pay-channel Sky TV, which, like The Post, is owned by News Corp. — or by just paying for US rights alone for new series.
In the past, HBO owned shows like “The Sopranos” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” outright. Under the new Cinemax plan, producers are free to sell their shows overseas — which in recent years has been paying big money to get hold of original American stuff with lots of guns and girls.
HBO declined to make any of its executives available to talk about the redirection of the junior channel.
“We’re exploring a few other shows like ‘Strike Back’ that we feel would add value for the Cinemax subscriber, but there is nothing else to announce at this time,” an HBO spokesman said yesterday.