Warner Bros. Discovery Rebrands Max Back to HBO Max — Again

 

So… it's HBO Max. Again.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Warner Bros. Discovery is rolling back the clock and restoring the HBO Max name this summer, reversing its 2023 decision to simply call the platform “Max.” This marks the third rebrand in five years, which, I mean, even for a media giant, feels like a bit of whiplash.

At first, this might sound like indecision. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s a course correction—finally leaning into the one brand that’s consistently delivered prestige, loyalty, and, well, critical clout. Because if there's one thing HBO has going for it, it's decades of being the place for high-quality storytelling. Prestige TV didn’t become a thing in a vacuum. It became a thing because of HBO.

Warner Bros. Discovery, or WBD, now seems to be realizing that “Max” just didn’t cut it. It was vague. Broad. A little… bland? Max could be a friend’s dog or an email login. It didn’t scream “watch this Emmy-winning drama right now.” But HBO Max? That says something.

David Zaslav, WBD’s CEO, made it pretty clear: it’s about quality over quantity now. In a streaming world where endless content is becoming more of a liability than a draw, WBD is going in the opposite direction of the content spigot model. The goal isn’t everything for everyone anymore. It’s something good—really good—for people who care about story, acting, craft.

You can feel that shift, even in how they talk about it. JB Perrette, who runs the streaming business, said it outright: “Our programming just hits different.” That might sound like a marketing line, but it’s also an honest reflection of where WBD wants to be positioned—slightly above the fray.

They’ve got numbers to back it up, too. A turnaround of nearly $3 billion in streaming profitability in just two years? That’s not nothing. And adding 22 million subscribers in the past year signals that the pivot toward “better, not more” may actually be working. Still, they’re not Netflix yet—far from it. Netflix has over 300 million subscribers. WBD wants 150 million by 2026. Ambitious, yes, but also grounded in the idea that not everyone wants all the content, just the right content.

There’s a certain irony here, though. The original move to HBO Max in 2020 was about expanding—folding in everything from reality shows to documentaries and kids’ programming under the HBO banner. Then they dropped the HBO part entirely in 2023 after merging with Discovery. And now… we’re back where we started, except this time it’s not about being broad. It’s about being bold. Focused. Curated.

That might be why this renaming doesn’t feel like just another branding hiccup. It feels like an identity claim.

One of the execs, Casey Bloys, put it this way: “It clearly states our implicit promise to deliver content that is recognized as unique and... worth paying for.” That phrase—“worth paying for”—stood out. It's almost quaint in a time where so much content is just... there, always, endlessly.

It’s also kind of refreshing to see a company admit when something’s not working and make a change—not just for the sake of optics, but with a strategy behind it. Maybe Max didn’t carry the weight they thought it would. Maybe the industry’s obsession with scale has finally started to buckle under its own pressure.

And maybe—just maybe—what people really want is fewer choices, but better ones.