Riley MacLeod, writing at Aftermath, has my favorite opening three paragraphs on the HBO Max saga.

Today, Warner Bros Discovery announced that it’s changing the name of its streaming service, Max, back to HBO Max. You might think it already had “HBO” in the name, because it is HBO, except Warner Bros has gone through a multi-year debate over the extent to which the thing it owns, HBO, is actually HBO, only to land us here on, yeah no, it’s HBO.

Come with me on a journey: in 2010 HBO launched its streamer HBO Go, which was available to HBO subscribers. In 2015 the company launched HBO Now, a different streamer that could be paid for without an HBO subscription. In 2020, both of these got subsumed into HBO Max. In 2023, Warner changed the name of HBO Max to just Max, which necessitated the tagline “the one to watch for HBO,” a fact previously conveyed by having the word “HBO” in the name. More confusingly, sometimes the company just called it “the one to watch,” while other times it used both taglines in the same breath.

But now, in 2025, Max is HBO Max again. The announcement is and isn’t a surprise; at the end of March, Max changed its logo to a black and white palette evocative of the original HBO colors. As quoted by Variety, WB CEO David Zaslav said of today’s name change, “Today, we are bringing back HBO, the brand that represents the highest quality in media,” despite a two-year hand-wringing over that very idea.

The countdown to it simply being known as HBO starts in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…