Today, Warner Bros Discovery announced that it’s changing the name of its streaming service, Max, back to HBO Max. You might think it already had “HBO” in the name, because it is HBO, except Warner Bros has gone through a multi-year debate over the extent to which the thing it owns, HBO, is actually HBO, only to land us here on, yeah no, it’s HBO.
Come with me on a journey: in 2010 HBO launched its streamer HBO Go, which was available to HBO subscribers. In 2015 the company launched HBO Now, a different streamer that could be paid for without an HBO subscription. In 2020, both of these got subsumed into HBO Max. In 2023, Warner changed the name of HBO Max to just Max, which necessitated the tagline “the one to watch for HBO,” a fact previously conveyed by having the word “HBO” in the name. More confusingly, sometimes the company just called it “the one to watch,” while other times it used both taglines in the same breath.
But now, in 2025, Max is HBO Max again. The announcement is and isn’t a surprise; at the end of March, Max changed its logo to a black and white palette evocative of the original HBO colors. As quoted by Variety, WB CEO David Zaslav said of today's name change, “Today, we are bringing back HBO, the brand that represents the highest quality in media,” despite a two-year hand-wringing over that very idea.
CEO of streaming and games JB Perrette said, “We will continue to focus on what makes us unique — not everything for everyone in a household, but something distinct and great for adults and families.” This statement comes despite Zaslav saying of the original name change that Max would let “every member of the household… see whatever they want at any given time.” Perrette also said that today’s change is “really not subjective, not even controversial — our programming just hits different,” but did not clarify who was finding calling HBO “HBO” controversial, or exactly what his definition of "subjective" is.
On Twitter, the official Max account (which as of this writing has not changed its profile pic or user name to include "HBO") is having a field day with this whole thing, quote-tweeting dunks, making Pope and Spider-man memes, and getting self-referential about the audience response. While this entire situation is an exercise in absurdity, an official brand account getting in on it reads less like good fun and more like a marketing department desperately flailing to make sense of something that cannot be made to make sense.
Honestly, I sort of admire that Zaslav and Perrette can get up in front of people and cast this whole thing as a brave new direction instead of a symptom of their complete inability to understand the value of their own product, a brand of confidence those of us with self-awareness do not possess. They do not know what makes the streamer “the one to watch” or even whether or not people should be watching HBO on it. (2023: no. 2025: yes.) They are not wrong that Max has (had?) more than just HBO on it, but their strategy for how to signal that was to… pretend it didn’t have HBO on it, only to walk back that decision by suddenly discovering that it seems like people want to pay for HBO’s streamer so they can watch HBO. I have long given up on wanting execs to actually care about their own products, but to watch these people so thoroughly and energetically fumble the bag by nitpicking over a name like an on-the-rocks couple getting a new dog is such a public humiliation that I’d almost feel bad for them if they weren’t systematically destroying everything in their path.
Anyway, it’s 2025 and I guess you can watch HBO on HBO again, a thing you’ve been doing since 1972.
