Warner Bros. Discovery has settled on a date to reskin the Max streamer back to HBO Max: Early this Wednesday morning, according to streamer insiders. The flip won’t happen simultaneously, but customers will see “HBO Max” on the apps that formerly said “Max” across the streamer’s territories on July 9.
The switch had been anticipated to take place sometime this summer, but Warner Bros. Discovery hadn’t revealed an exact day for the reversal until now. The timing is key: Execs wanted to restore the “HBO Max” name prior to next week’s Emmy nominations announcement on July 15.
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The decision to turn “Max” back into “HBO Max” was first announced in May, timed to Warner Bros. Discovery’s upfronts presentation. At the time, WBD said in a press release that “returning the HBO brand into HBO Max will further drive the service forward and amplify the uniqueness that subscribers can expect from the offering. 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.”
Later, at the WBD upfront, Warner Bros. Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav added, “The powerful growth we have seen in our global streaming service is built around the quality of our programming. Today, we are bringing back HBO, the brand that represents the highest quality in media, to further accelerate that growth in the years ahead.”
The streamer launched as HBO Max in 2020, but then WBD opted to excise HBO from the streamer’s name in 2023, changing it to just “Max.” (HBO and Max continued to compete under one “HBO/Max” label for industry awards; for next week’s Emmy noms, they can once again just be called “HBO Max.”)
The return to HBO Max just two years later elicited plenty of guffaws in the industry — including internally. “I know you’re all shocked, but the good news is I have a drawer full of stationary from the last time around,” HBO and Max content chief Casey Bloys joked to the upfronts crowd . HBO Max CMO Shauna Spenley gave her spin of the famous Spider-man pointing meme — but instead with three Superman characters pointing to each other, with the names “HBO Go,” “Max” and “HBO Max.” Spenley also admitted that she couldn’t wait to see how “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver will mock the name change on his next episode.
And of course, that following Sunday, Oliver did indeed mock his corporate bosses for the move. Comparing the name change to Donald Trump’s decision to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” Oliver said on his show: “Sometimes, hypothetically, before we can get used to one dumb name” — here the HBO Go logo appeared on the screen — “some genius comes along and only makes it dumber” (HBO Now). “Then, somehow it gets dumber still” (HBO Max) “and against all the odds it becomes even worse” (Max) “before inexplicably going back to the stupid thing it was before” (HBO Max).
HBO/Max’s social team also had some fun with the change. “These rebrands are trying to murder me,” the (soon-to-be-defunct) Stream on Max account said in its updated bio on X at the time.
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