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HBO Max Needs More HBO

After a two-year identity crisis at the newly re-rechristened service, how can David Zaslav and Casey Bloys make the streamer successful, and not just the butt of every joke?

Casey Bloys, David Zaslav
At this point, Zaslav and Bloys have likely come to terms with the fact that HBO Max will never replace Netflix, but they can at least pivot to building a completely different business. Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer/GA/The Hollywood Reporter/Getty Images
Julia Alexander
July 14, 2025

It’s easy to mock David Zaslav for his decision to re-rebrand the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max, then as Max, back to HBO Max—it’s an almost perfect metaphor, really, for the general strategic confusion that followed the WarnerMedia–Discovery merger. Zaslav initially chased scale, but Max never accounted for more than 2 percent of total TV viewing in the U.S., according to Nielsen, placing it behind every major paid streamer except Peacock as well as the Roku Channel and Tubi, which are both free. Max also has the highest churn rate of all the major U.S. streamers, and it just lost the NBA. On the other hand, the name change was the correct move, and it’s one among a number of things that HBO Max is finally, belatedly, starting to get right.