Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

[Dacey]

I just wish that JKR weren’t involved in this at all. She’s kind of blown her reputation in a huge way over the last few years.

And this isn’t like Golden Compass where the series came after a box office failure. Everyone has watched these films and knows the story. How is it going to pull off weekly cliffhangers?

And as an aside, who on earth is telling Zaslav that “Max” is a good name?!?!

[James]

For most people, JKR's reputation was hurt more by the Fantastic Beast movies than anything else!

[Dacey]

Not really.

[Ben]

Max *is* hilariously poor as a name, especially with the filled in O from the HBO leftovers.

[EricJ]

They could be cool and call it "The Maxx", but then we'd just be picturing that pretentious MTV cartoon.

[Ben]

Relax, Max!

[Daniel]

Zany to the Max!

[Randall]

Extra confusing for us here, as our TV service from the phone company is also called MaxTV, but people mostly just refer to it as "Max."

[Ben]

Yeah, we have a SkyMax channel here too, which natch just gets called Max. Even more confusingly, it often shows some of the programmes from Sky Atlantic, which combines content from Showtime and HBO, so we’ll get a bunch of WB-owned shows on the Max channel here which isn’t actually the actual Max.

The issue is that it isn’t a brand name. Even Peacock is a nickname for NBC because of its logo. Paramount is known as The Mountain, but Paramount+ makes more sense. Max is just such a lame non-name, they’d have been better off going with the established brand and a still fairly boring WB+ that at least would have been clear as to what it was (the Discovery bit being the plus).

I give it until Crimbo, if not before, until it gets another rebrand.

[EricJ]

The only possible reason I can see for "Max" was to legally get "HBO" out of the name--
I'm sure we'll hear more about that later on...

[Ben]

There was no reason to keep or lose the HBO name. They used it in the first place because it was an established "quality" subscription brand. The likelihood is that they would have kept it if they hadn’t wanted to sound "new" because Discovery was now lumped in. Bet you that they just couldn’t come up with a new name: Warner Bros. Discovery Max, or even Plus, is a mouthful, so I reckon they just dropped anything that was leaning either way and just ended up with the pointless, non-associated Max. HBO is actually remaining as branding for HBO shows, so there’s nothing "legal" about that either.

The pointless new name is just like Disney's service, or most others for that matter, just being called Plus, haha!