HBO Max

HBO Max launched in 2020 with the three letters that still mean a certain kind of television sitting on top of Max. In May 2023, after the WarnerMedia–Discovery merger, the service came back as Max. DixonBaxi drew a lowercase wordmark that borrowed HBO’s bullseye and the Warner Bros. shield curves, then left HBO off the door.

The idea was a bigger catalogue under a friendlier name: Discovery, DC, Harry Potter, and the dramas, without HBO sounding like a filter. Purple became blue. Karun Agimal said dropping HBO would also protect HBO. David Zaslav wanted scale. Viewers heard a cheaper product.

Max already means too many other things

Max is a limit, a magazine, a credit card, a first name, a setting on a speaker. Combining it with HBO told you which Max. Splitting them asked the shorter word to inherit the standard. It didn’t. The DixonBaxi drawing is a handsome piece of type. Handsome is not a substitute for the three letters people already pay for.

On 14 May 2025, at an upfront, Warner Bros. Discovery said it would be HBO Max again that summer. Casey Bloys talked about an implicit promise, the old HBO line about being worth paying for. On 9 July the apps updated. The App Store note: “Same app. New-ish name.” The Verge called the two-year detour an all-time screw-up. That is unfair to some actual all-time screw-ups, and still directionally right.

Weight Watchers hid the words behind WW and had to bring the sentence back. Twitter dropped the only distinctive word and still has not. HBO Max is the version that admitted the short name had given away the only distinctive word. Two years of Max did not make Max mean HBO. It made HBO Max mean, briefly, a company that thought the premium bit was a problem.

The three letters were the product

A streaming tile on a TV is the size of a stamp. HBO, even badly drawn, still reads as HBO. Max, even well drawn, reads as a gym. DixonBaxi’s a, with the bullseye in it, was a nice in-joke for people who already knew. In-jokes do not survive the living-room remote.

The 2025 return put HBO back on top of the existing word. Same app, as the patch notes said. The plot twist everyone had been waiting for, if you like marketing copy. The plainer version: they spent two years teaching people a worse name, then asked for the old one back because the old one still had the only meaning in the building.

• DixonBaxi creates brand identity for streaming service Max, Design Week, April 2023
• HBO Max is officially HBO Max again, The Verge, 9 July 2025