Less than two months after Warner Bros. Discovery updated the Max logo to include a black and white palette conspicuously like the HBO brand, the streaming service will now be known as … HBO Max. Again.
Yes, the transformation from HBO to HBO Go to HBO Now to HBO Max to Max to HBO Max is finally complete. Warner Bros. Discovery made the surprise announcement on Wednesday, just over two years after the company dropped HBO from the streaming service’s name to begin with. That move came after Warner Media first merged with Discovery and made the brave decision to nix arguably the most prestigious brand name in television from its streamer’s title in order to denote that the service was now supplying an expanded well of content. “The thinking at the time was that once you put HBO in the title, it defines everything that comes on the platform,” HBO chairman of content Casey Bloys said in a podcast interview with Matthew Belloni on The Town last month. “And we knew we had a lot of lean-back Discovery programming, and HBO wasn’t designed to be defined by that kind of programming. So the idea was to make HBO a sub-brand so that it didn’t have to define all of that.” Never mind all that, then, I guess. Even the official HBO X account is memeing itself.
“Returning the HBO brand into HBO Max will further drive the service forward and amplify the uniqueness that subscribers can expect from the offering,” Warner Bros. Discovery said in a press release on Wednesday. “It is also a testament to WBD’s willingness to keep boldly iterating its strategy and approach—leaning heavily on consumer data and insights—to best position itself for success.” This is a master class in spin if I’ve ever seen one. But the most intriguing nugget from the release might be the following: “No consumer today is saying they want more content, but most consumers are saying they want better content. With other services filling the more basic needs with volume, WBD has clearly distinguished itself through its quality and distinct stories, and no brand has done that better and more consistently over 50+ years than HBO.”
Translation: “We thought we could directly compete with Netflix, but, hoo boy, we were super wrong.”
In 2025, it’s apparent that Netflix has emerged as the clear winner of the so-called Streaming Wars. It currently sits at 301 million global subscribers, just over an estimated 100 million more than the next competitor, Amazon Prime (which, let’s be honest, probably gets much of its business from shopping, not entertainment), and an estimated 179 million more than Max (ahem, HBO Max). In terms of pure output, as the press release rightly points out, HBO Max can’t compete with Netflix—and it’s never really tried to. The one thing HBO can hold over its rival is its brand name, the esteemed home of The Sopranos and The Wire, yes, but also, in the past year alone, The Rehearsal, House of the Dragon, The White Lotus, Industry, The Last of Us, and The Righteous Gemstones. Stamping your identity with HBO makes perfect sense—so much sense that you wonder why “HBO” was ever dropped from “Max” to begin with.
Part of the explanation might come down to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, whose record since taking over WBD in 2022 has been … debatable. Zaslav’s business acumen is such that he’s killed movies for a tax write-off; pissed off some of the best creatives in the game; made significant cuts to the beloved Turner Classic Movies; turned Cartoon Network into a shell of itself; championed The Alto Knights, which has grossed under $10 million at the box office; and mulled firing Warner Bros. studio heads Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy before the studio’s Sinners and A Minecraft Movie became the two biggest movies in America.
On the face of it, you can’t help but feel like Zaslav is someone who, because he came in from Discovery, was insecure that his old company’s programming was a steep drop-off from freakin’ HBO. There’s no shame in that! The wild thing is that this continuous clusterfuck has been a needless distraction from Max—sorry, HBO Max—being arguably the best bang for your buck in the streaming space. Remember, The Pitt is a Max original—you probably would’ve checked it out a lot sooner if you’d known it was essentially an HBO series.
To be fair, I’m not convinced that anyone ever stopped referring to HBO Max as “HBO Max.” Zaslav and the Warner Bros. top brass may not have realized, but we all knew it was the right thing to do.
