It’s not Max. It’s HBO Max — again.

In a surprise pivot, Warner Bros. Discovery announced Wednesday that the streaming service Max would be renamed HBO Max, reinstating the app’s old name and abandoning a contentious change that the company introduced two years ago.

The reason for the change, executives explained, is straightforward.

People who subscribe and pay $17 a month for the streaming service wind up watching HBO content, such as “The White Lotus” and “The Last of Us,” as well as new movies, documentaries and not much more.

“It really is a reaction to being in the marketplace for two years, evaluating what’s working and really leaning into that,” Casey Bloys, the chair of HBO content, said in an interview.

HBO, a trailblazer of the cable era, has been on a very bumpy ride to finding an identity in the streaming era. There was HBO Go (2008), HBO Now (2015), HBO Max (2020), Max (2023) and now, once again, HBO Max (2025).

Two years ago, Warner Bros. Discovery executives said that they meant well by changing the name to Max. Their overwhelming concern, the executives said, was that Discovery’s suite of reality shows — “Sister Wives,” “My Feet Are Killing Me” — risked watering down the HBO brand, which continued to produce award- winning shows, such as “Succession.”

Further, they said, HBO spent decades branding itself as a premium adult service. That was not exactly an ideal anchor for a streaming service that they envisioned would compete head-to-head with a general entertainment app like Netflix.

In the past few years, Netflix has taken a runaway lead over old guard entertainment brands, drawing roughly 8% of all television time in March, according to Nielsen.

Executives have conceded in recent months that competing with an everything-for-everybody app like Netflix, which has more than 300 million subscribers, was not realistic. Instead, they would be perfectly happy to be a complementary service.