It's Not Max. It's HBO Max. Again.
Jennifer Maas
I want you to close your eyes. Imagine a slogan: "It's not TV. It's HBO." Now imagine that slogan morphing into: "It's not HBO. It's HBO Max." Now imagine that slogan morphing into: "It's not HBO Max. It's Max." Now imagine that slogan morphing into: "It's not Max. It's HBO Max."
Open your eyes. No, you are not going insane. This has really just happened.1
The change comes just over two years after Warner Bros. Discovery decided to drop HBO from the streamer’s name to become just Max. Note that while HBO and Max have carried separate commercial branding during that time, they’ve competed under one “HBO/Max” label for industry awards.
The surprise announcement, made less than two months after Max tweaked its logo to look more like the classic black-and-white HBO color scheme, was revealed at Warner Bros. Discovery’s upfront presentation to ad execs in New York on Wednesday.
That logo tweak, led me write the following back in March:
Look, it’s fine. It’s not great, but it could be worse — far worse, even. I continue to take issue more with the ‘Max’ name — far too generic — than the logo, but whatever. Mainly this just reminds me that I still miss the old school HBO, where I knew that what I was watching would be good. HBO still has mostly good content but it’s buried in a bunch of other stuff included with Max.
Well, sure enough, a month later, a WSJ profile revealed WBD's renewed flight to quality, for the HBO brand in particular. As I quipped in my headline: HBO Became HBO Before HBO Could Become Netflix. And now it's nearly literal.
In a press release, WBD said “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.”
That's one way to frame it, I guess. But also, many of us knew moving on from the HBO brand was a bad idea when it happened – and AT&T's own messing with the brand before they offloaded it to WBD should have made this all the more evident. And yet, here we are. They tried, but they couldn't become Netflix.
As I concluded in my post in March:
That just leads me to wonder if WBD isn’t considering taking the entire brand back to ‘HBO’ and away from ‘Max’? Did they get that right? Maybe they should merge the entire thing with Paramount+ and call the app ‘Showtime’.
Well, they did it. Those crazy sonofabitches did it. We're now one inevitable step away from this going full circle. Hopefully not all the way back to 'TV'.
One more thing: with WBD on the verge of splitting the business into two, undoubtedly to better position at least one of those pieces for a sale, one has to wonder if a move back to the HBO brand isn't a way to try to get a premium on this particular asset. Does, say, Apple want to buy Max? I mean, I maybe – there are aspects that make sense, at least on paper. But does Apple want to buy HBO? Hell yes, they already tried to do that once. And now Apple TV+ is the new HBO.
Well, the old HBO, I suppose. Which may soon be the new HBO again...
1 We will not bring up 'HBO Go' or 'HBO Now' but they happened.