HBO Max Becoming Just "Max"

I hate it.

It has been four days now since Warner Bros. Discovery announced HBO Max will soon become simply “Max” — and I am still seething. 

Admittedly, this is a complicated situation for the media conglomerate, and undoubtedly there are angles that I, a feeble-minded consumer, may not be considering, but I’ve been in the content game for 12 years, I feel like I have a decent mind for marketing and branding, and I have watched more HBO programming than any living human who desires to maintain a healthy and balanced life should, so I think I’m qualified to speak on the fact that this is fucking ridiculous.

The streaming wars, kicked off by Netflix, caused hiccups for pretty much every major television network in their efforts to adapt, but perhaps no one has fumbled the ball harder than America’s finest premium television producer.

For those of you who are longtime HBO subscribers, you should remember the confusion around whether you should have HBO GO, or HBO Now, or both. Why were there two HBO apps? What was the difference? Top scientists are still trying to solve that mystery. Eventually, both apps were scrapped and replaced with HBO Max in 2020, and that seemed to be that. NOT.

Three years of peace. That’s all we got.

Then, on April 8, 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery was formed after the spin-off of WarnerMedia by AT&T and its merger with Discovery, Inc., which ironically sounds like a plot line straight from HBO’s “Succession.” That merger led to a number of slightly alarming business decisions with regard to HBO and their programming, most notably the removal of several shows from their streaming platform, like “Westworld” and “Raised by Wolves,” which was apparently done for tax purposes. Sad!

Now, after just three years of HBO Max, the decision has been made to drop the front half and leave us with just Max. 

In my lifetime, there is one brand that stands above all the rest when it comes to premium television programming. It’s HBO. HBO is the king of the castle, the cream of the crop, and anyone who knows TV knows this to be big facts.

The Sopranos. The Wire. Game of Thrones. Band of Brothers. Deadwood. The Leftovers. Succession. True Detective season one. Chernobyl. The White Lotus. Boardwalk Empire. Euphoria. The Last of Us. Barry. Curb Your Enthusiasm. Veep. Sex and the City. 

Those are just the absolutely inarguable, all-time great, hall of fame level classics with both critical and commercial acclaim that I can remember off the top. HBO’s hit list is insane. Unrivaled. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is fucking with HBO. Nobody ever has, and I used to think nobody ever would.

So someone, please, make it make sense to me how you abandon the most respected and recognizable name in television history for the back half of Cinemax when the obvious and easy decision is to name your fucking streaming platform HBO+ and let the chips fall where they may with regard to consumer confusion. I can almost hear the dumbass boardroom conversations that led to this asinine move.

But nobody watches a non-Netflix show on Netflix and says, “Hey, wait a minute! This wasn’t made by Netflix! I feel the Netflix brand is being muddled and confused in my tiny peanut brain!” That is not a thing, yet it is clearly one of the things that led Warner Bros. Discovery executives to decide they want to name their streaming platform Max like it’s a pet cat.

I am an abnormally large HBO fan, because their programming over the years has massively impacted my life and career, so I don’t expect that everyone cares about this nonsense as much as I do, but you should, because them changing the name of their streaming platform to Max is as dumb, if not dumber, than Facebook changing their name to Meta, and that’s not the conversation I want my favorite TV programming producer to be involved in at all.

Here’s a quote from Discovery CEO David Zaslav during a presentation announcing the change: “Max is the one to watch, because it’s home to shows that have a supersized effect on people and culture. It’s streaming’s version of must-see TV.”

That’s exactly the sort of nonsensical silliness I’d expect from some boneheaded bigwig douchebag who has absolutely no idea what consumers really want. A bunch of words strung together, with no real meaning, totally void of logic and reason. Thanks for coming out, David!

They also announced a new “Game of Thrones” spinoff prequel and made the new “Harry Potter” series official in the same presentation, seemingly in an effort to massage the inevitably negative blowback from the Max change, like “We realize this is confusing and stupid, but also GAME OF THRONES and HARRY POTTER!”

Max launches on May 23rd and will combine scripted dramas like HBO’s “Succession,” “White Lotus” and “House of the Dragon” with Discovery’s unscripted crap that I do not give a flying shit sandwich about. Pricing will remain the same as current HBO Max plans, so at least there’s that.

They say that on the new service’s launch date, HBO Max will automatically “update as the Max app for the majority of users.” See how stupid that sounds? The Max app. For fuck’s sake. They say “some users on certain platforms will be prompted to make the switch themselves” when they enter the old app. BAHHHH! On top of that, Discovery+ as an app will remain unaffected, because, as they said, the company doesn’t “want to leave any of its profitable subscribers behind.”

God I hate this fucking shit. Just have one app, name the stupid fucking thing HBO+ and then make all the different brands in your stupid giant mega media conglomerate clusterfuck have different sections within the app like Disney+ does with Marvel and Pixar and Star Wars and all the other shit they have under their umbrella.

I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLS.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.