Max will once again be HBO Max. Yes, it's aware of the irony

The streaming service formerly known as HBO Max will once again be called HBO Max.

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) announced Wednesday that it will soon put the "HBO" back in the name, two years — and much criticism — after dropping it.

"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 said in a release.

Following the 2022 merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, Inc., executives hoped that the name "Max" would reflect a broader mix of programming and signal more family-friendly content.

But the change never really caught on, even as popular HBO originals like The White Lotus and The Last of Us dominated the discourse and drove people to the platform — Warner Bros. Discovery says it added 22 million subscribers over the past year. It hopes the rebrand, slated for this summer, will build on that momentum.

"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," the release says.

The announcement was greeted with considerable social media mockery — not least of all from the streamer itself.

Max updated its bio on X (which many people still call Twitter) to "these rebrands are trying to murder me," a reference to one of its hit shows. Then it proceeded to tweet a series of memes poking fun at its own identity crisis and public reaction.

It turned to some of its most recognizable names to make the point — from a gif of Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep to a reaction from The Pitt star Noah Wyle to a video montage of various celebrities publicly struggling to get on board with "Max."

While the 2023 name change was preceded by a price hike — Max plans range from basic at $9.99 per month to premium at $20.99 — the company has not announced any changes to pricing or subscription tiers this time around. It says of the platform: "same app, new-ish name."

The streaming service has gone by several names over the years, well before this "debranding."

It has its roots in the cable station HBO — Home Box Office — which was founded in 1972 and offered uncut and commercial-free movies.

HBO grew over the years and, in the late 1990s, began to experiment with original programming. It struck gold with The Sopranos — a show widely credited with revolutionizing television — and hits like The Wire and Sex and the City. The cultural juggernaut also established additional channels, like HBO Family and HBO Latino.

In 2010, it launched HBO Go, an internet streaming service automatically accessible to cable subscribers. Five years later came HBO Now, a standalone streaming service with no cable subscription necessary.

They were both eventually folded into HBO Max 1.0, which launched in May 2020. By that point, AT&T had acquired HBO's parent company, TimeWarner, in a controversial $85 billion merger. So the new streaming platform included not only HBO shows but programming from the Warner Bros. film studio, the Turner family of cable networks and even the complete library of Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, among others.

The May 2023 rebrand to Max was widely panned, with critics confused by both the separation from HBO and a glitchy tech rollout.

In late March of this year, the company changed the Max logo from shiny blue to black and white — a callback to the original HBO branding and perhaps a signal that the brand would shift once again. To much of the internet, this new reversal is both further whiplash and a welcome course correction.

"With the course we are on and strong momentum we are enjoying, we believe HBO Max far better represents our current consumer proposition," Casey Bloys, chair and CEO of HBO and Max Content, said at the WBD Upfront on Wednesday.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the audience responded with laughter and palpable approval, as Bloys acknowledged the back and forth.

"The good news is I have a drawer full of stationery from the last round," he said. "So I'm all set."

Plenty of other companies have embarked on recent rebrands, whether changing their logo, their layout — as fellow streaming platform Netflix announced earlier this month — or their name altogether.

Consider Facebook changing its name to Meta in 2021, and Twitter rebranding as X in 2023 — as Max playfully acknowledged in a tweet: "Your move, @X."

Last year, after more than a century, the Campbell Soup Company dropped "soup" from its name. Dunkin', which had long been on a first-name basis with many customers, officially dropped the "Donuts" in 2019. The year before that, Weight Watchers became WW.

Allen Adamson, co-founder of the marketing consultancy Metaforce, told NPR at the time that companies rebrand to stay relevant.

"People are finding doughnuts not the healthiest thing or weight watching not as interesting as it used to be," he said. (Weight Watchers filed for bankruptcy this month.)

Many of the companies we know today started out with entirely different names. Nike was once Blue Ribbon Sports, Pepsi-Cola started out as Brad's Drink and Subway was founded as Pete's Super Submarines.

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