Everybody Rejoice. Max Will Be Once Again Known as HBO Max.

HBO’s streaming service has been through a few rebrands in a short amount of time. Back on Marcy 27, 2020 while we were all distracted by murder hornets, Mr. Peanut dying, and a new germ craze called Covid, HBO launched HBO Max, their streaming service.

Then in 2023 it underwent a poorly conceived rebrand to just Max. Aside from “Max” being applied to so many products that it’s lost all meaning (and ability to stand out), whenever somebody said they were going to watch Max, it sounded like they were talking about babysitting an obnoxious, rich child named Max, the kind of person who grows up to use “lunch” as a verb and marries someone named Buffy.

Now the Max moniker is dead, and we’re back to HBO Max. Well, we will be sometime this summer. Who knows why it takes that long to rebrand (HBO should be well practiced at it by now), but at least it’s coming.

an inevitable change

The official line on the name change doesn’t say much, just a lot of corporate buzz speak. You can read it here if you want. The most telling bit of justification to grab from Warner Bros’ Discovery’s (owner of HBO) press release is that “… 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.”

So it comes down to not throwing away 50 years of strong consumer respect and affinity for a brand that spent its entire lifespan building up. We could’ve told them that two years ago when they rebranded HBO Max to Max. I’m pretty sure a bunch of people did, to tell you the truth.

Anyway, everyone I know had just kept calling it HBO all along. Sometimes they’d say HBO Max. The very few times I heard anyone say Max, it was always followed by a “Huh?” We’ll all keep right on trucking with what we’ve been doing all along, which is calling it HBO Max.

Glad to see that Warner Bros. Discovery came around, though, and realized that in a world of streaming services, the HBO brand name is gold.