Warner Bros. Discovery's (WBD) streaming service Max will be called HBO Max starting this summer, bringing back a name that WBD curiously ditched a couple of years ago.

HBO Max has joined Coca-Cola and Netflix among prominent companies that have undergone well-publicized pivots.

May 15 (UPI) -- HBO has announced that the name of its streaming service is changing back from Max to HBO Max this summer. HBO Max is what the platform was known as when it launched in 2020, but the HBO portion of the name was dropped in 2023 as its parent company sought to give it its own identity.

Warner Bros. Discovery's rebranding of HBO Max highlights the merger's failure to reach its original goal.

WBD CEO David Zaslav announced the move, with the company declaring, "no consumer today is saying they want more content, but better content."

Home Box Office is a legend in American television, one of the industry's most famed and prestigious brands. So it was a mystery when its new owners renamed it "Max"-a name so generic and bland it could apply to almost anything.

“I am completely bewildered by the HBO Max rebrand,” says Debbie Millman, a designer, brand consultant, and host of the Design Matters podcast. “HBO took four decades of prestige and casually tossed it all into a dumpster, lit a match, and cheered as it burned.”

"What do we think?" one of the streaming service's social media posts, which included a meme from the HBO show "Veep," said. In a separate X post, Max shared a GIF of another HBO