Sure, 'Max' Sounds Stupid, But HBO Max Needed A Reboot
There are a lot of things I think of when I hear the name "Max". There's Max Headroom, the AI icon of the 80s that has been on my mind a lot lately. Mad Max! Max Payne! Every friend I've ever had was named Max (whom I've always been jealous of). Even Homer Simpson's alternate character, Max Power. But there's no universe where I associate "Max" with HBO, even though we've lived with "HBO Max" for years. "HBO" has always been the dominant part of that name, while "Max" looked like a holdover from its sister network Cinemax.
Warner Bros. Discovery
So I'm sure many viewers will be surprised to hear that HBO Max will be rebranded as "Max" on May 23rd. Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav, who led the $43 billion merger between WB and his former company Discovery, announced the new service at a media event this morning. It's been a year since Zaslav finalized this merger and announced plans to combine each network's content. And, given the increasingly unstable world of streaming media, he probably had to act fast. But the rebranding seems like a missed opportunity to align the new service with something people already know and love.
Now, to be clear, Zaslav's desire to build something new makes sense. HBO Max's launch in May 2020 was notoriously rocky, so much so that it led to a series of executive layoffs. HBO Max was a blatant attempt to catch up with Disney+, which hit 10 million subscribers just a day after its debut. But it couldn't compete with Disney's seemingly limitless library of content. A month after HBO Max arrived, AT&T (the owner of TimeWarner at the time) said the service had just 4.1 million active users. The company tried to make it more popular by claiming it had 23.6 million "wholesale" subscribers, but those were mostly existing HBO customers who had never touched the HBO Max app.
As a relatively new executive at Warner Bros., Zaslav probably wanted to stand out with his own service. (Media executives just can't help it,
There are a lot of things I think of when I hear the name "Max". There's Max Headroom, the AI icon of the 80s that has been on my mind a lot lately. Mad Max! Max Payne! Every friend I've ever had was named Max (whom I've always been jealous of). Even Homer Simpson's alternate character, Max Power. But there's no universe where I associate "Max" with HBO, even though we've lived with "HBO Max" for years. "HBO" has always been the dominant part of that name, while "Max" looked like a holdover from its sister network Cinemax.
Warner Bros. Discovery
So I'm sure many viewers will be surprised to hear that HBO Max will be rebranded as "Max" on May 23rd. Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav, who led the $43 billion merger between WB and his former company Discovery, announced the new service at a media event this morning. It's been a year since Zaslav finalized this merger and announced plans to combine each network's content. And, given the increasingly unstable world of streaming media, he probably had to act fast. But the rebranding seems like a missed opportunity to align the new service with something people already know and love.
Now, to be clear, Zaslav's desire to build something new makes sense. HBO Max's launch in May 2020 was notoriously rocky, so much so that it led to a series of executive layoffs. HBO Max was a blatant attempt to catch up with Disney+, which hit 10 million subscribers just a day after its debut. But it couldn't compete with Disney's seemingly limitless library of content. A month after HBO Max arrived, AT&T (the owner of TimeWarner at the time) said the service had just 4.1 million active users. The company tried to make it more popular by claiming it had 23.6 million "wholesale" subscribers, but those were mostly existing HBO customers who had never touched the HBO Max app.
As a relatively new executive at Warner Bros., Zaslav probably wanted to stand out with his own service. (Media executives just can't help it,
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