(Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery)
Here we go again. Warner Bros. Discovery has announced that it will rebrand its Max streaming service to HBO Max this summer.
The streamer has gone through various name changes over the years. After starting as HBO Go as a pay-TV add-on in 2008, it evolved into the standalone HBO Now in 2015 to capitalize on the popularity of Game of Thrones. By 2020, it was rebranded as HBO Max to incorporate more WarnerMedia content. HBO then got dropped from the name in 2023 after WarnerMedia and Discovery merged to become Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).
It's now circling back to HBO Max. According to WBD President and CEO David Zaslav, the HBO brand "represents the highest quality in media," so reviving the moniker aims to "further accelerate that growth in the years ahead."
WBD says its streaming business gained 22 million subscribers over the past year, which it attributes to "re-focusing the strategy on the programming that is working best, like HBO, recent box-office movies, docuseries, certain reality series, and Max and local originals, and de-prioritizing other genres that drive less engagement or acquisition."
It didn't say which shows or movies were doing poorly, though it recently canceled a few high-profile series, including The Sex Lives of College Girls, Bookie, and The Franchise.
We got a hint of the HBO rebrand in late March when WBD swapped Max's purple-and-white logo for a black-and-white one that resembles the old-school HBO logo. Last year, it also marketed shows like The Penguin and Dune: Prophecy as HBO Originals when they were initially billed as Max Originals.
“With the course we are on and strong momentum we are enjoying, we believe HBO Max far better represents our current consumer proposition,” says Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and Max Content. “And it clearly states our implicit promise to deliver content that is recognized as unique and, to steal a line we always said at HBO, worth paying for.”