Delivering on the “hot take” that his corporate bosses anticipated over the ongoing fiasco that is Warner Bros. Discovery’s branding of its premier HBO streaming service, John Oliver slammed the “genius” behind the move while comparing it to Donald Trump’s “Gulf of America” name change.
At the same time, the Last Week Tonight host took exception to the company’s executives saying at WBD’s upfront presentation last week that they “cannot wait for his hot take on this whole rebrand” because they “think it’s going to be pretty hot,” making it clear it was his choice to mock them.
“F*** you, don’t tell me what to do!” Oliver exclaimed on his HBO show.
Two years after inexplicably changing the name of the company’s top streamer to just Max, WBD announced at the upfront with advertisers that it was going back to the previous name – HBO Max. Branding experts, meanwhile, derided the company for having to do a “corporate walk of shame” after realizing it had “destroyed 50 years of prestige” by excising “HBO” from the name in 2023.
Devoting his main segment to President Donald Trump’s increasingly antagonistic relationship with the media, Oliver brought up the changes the administration has made to the White House press room.
At one point, the HBO host brought up press secretary Karoline Leavitt banning Associated Press reporters from the Oval Office over the publication’s editorial decision to continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its original name following Trump’s executive order rebranding it the “Gulf of America.”
“It has clients all over the world, and lots of them still use the term the Gulf of Mexico,” Oliver noted on the AP’s guidelines. “So it’s not as simple as you’re making out there, especially because it can take time for people to adjust to a stupid name change.”
From there, the comic turned his attention to his corporate parent and ran through the litany of different names and logos Warner Bros. Discovery has latched onto the streaming service before finally settling, once again, on HBO Max.
“Sometimes, hypothetically, before we can even get used to one dumb name [HBO Go], some genius comes along and only makes it dumber [HBO Now],” he quipped. “Then somehow it gets dumber still [HBO Max], and then against all the odds, somehow 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 streaming marketing chief Shauna Spenley said she was awaiting Oliver’s segment on the matter, seemingly part of the company’s attempted self-deprecating approach to the announcement. After unveiling the HBO Max flip-flop, the corporation’s social media accounts posted a number of memes in an effort to head off any ridicule.
“Incidentally, only this week, my parent company apparently said they cannot wait for my hot take on this whole rebrand — believing that whatever I say about this change was going to be pretty hot, so please look me in the eyes when I say this: F*** you, don’t tell me what to do,” he declared.
“I’m not gonna do it if you want it 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 can a company be that smart when they’re the same people that came up with so many stupid f***ing names?” Oliver snarked.
This wasn’t the only portion of Sunday night’s show that took aim at Warner Bros. Discovery over the name change.
Towards the end of the opening credits, a graphic appeared that featured all of the streamer’s previous logos alongside the caption “Mutatis Mutandis.” On top of that, the program’s “And Now This” segment featured a slew of local TV anchors giving their own “hot takes” on the rebranding effort.
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