John Oliver is just as confounded as everyone else about Warner Bros. Discovery’s decision to revert the name of Max to HBO Max after just two years.
On Sunday’s episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” — which is streaming on, um, Max/HBO Max — the host was discussing President Trump’s antagonism toward the press, and he brought up the White House’s blocking access to the AP for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as such instead of calling it the Gulf of America as Trump decreed.
“It can take time for people to adjust to a stupid name change,” Oliver said.
Oliver continued, “Sometimes, hypothetically, before we can get used to one dumb name” — here the HBO Go logo appeared on the screen — “some genius comes along and only makes it dumber” (HBO Now). “Then, somehow it gets dumber still” (HBO Max) “and against all the odds it becomes even worse” (Max) “before inexplicably going back to the stupid thing it was before” (HBO Max).
Oliver also noted that Warner Bros. Discovery execs anticipated a response from him — indeed, they spun it as a sort of tune-in moment. “We just cannot wait for his hot take on this whole rebrand. We think it’s going to be pretty hot,” WBD streaming marketing chief Shauna Spenley joked at the May 14 upfront, splashing an image of Oliver with his head face-down on a desk on the theater’s big screen
“Please look me in the eyes when I tell you this: Fuck you, don’t tell me what to do!” Oliver said with mock outrage. “I’m not going to do it if you want.”
“Unless, wait, hold on, maybe you thought baiting me like that would be a good way to stop me from doing it. But on the other hand, how could a company be that smart when they’re the same company that came up with so many stupid fucking names?” Oliver said.
Last week at the Warner Bros. Discovery advertising upfront, the media conglomerate announced the switch back to HBO Max, returning the premium cabler’s name to its flagship streaming product and trying to undo what branding experts have called a big misfire (a “corporate walk of shame,” in the words of one). Here’s how CEO David Zaslav explained the reasoning behind the about-face: “The powerful growth we have seen in our global streaming service is built around the quality of our programming. Today, we are bringing back HBO, the brand that represents the highest quality in media, to further accelerate that growth in the years ahead.”
SEE ALSO: Branding Experts on Decision to Flip Max Back to HBO Max: ‘A Corporate Walk of Shame’
Oliver has bitten the hand that feeds him before on this issue. He slammed his corporate overlords for their decision in 2023 to chop HBO off the streaming service’s name, a change it made as it added thousands of hours of content from Discovery’s networks. After WBD announced the name change to Max, Oliver told his viewers, “Our business daddy took its content purge up a notch and threw the whole HBO out.” The following week, he shared a facetious new slogan for Max: “Hey, do you like HBO but want ads, the ‘Property Brothers’ but also don’t like HBO? Max! There’s entertainment in watching a company die!”
And he also had expressed his displeasure with WBD’s decision in February 2024 to begin delaying the release of full episodes of “Last Week Tonight” on YouTube for free in an effort to spur paid signups to Max. “It’s massively frustrating to me,” Oliver said last fall. “I was not happy with it at all.”
This February, episodes of “Last Week Tonight” quietly resumed posting to YouTube shortly after they premiere on Max.