Honestly. It feels like they didn’t even bother to focus group this. I don’t know how execs didn’t have an immediate understanding it was a bad idea, but even if for whatever reason they couldn’t immediately tell, they didn’t bother to check with anyone else. I don’t know a single person who thought it made sense branding wise. They could’ve asked five people on the street and saved millions of dollars. Plus, I had HBO for a bit so they have my email (spam email), every once in a while I’d login and see emails from Max and think it’s like a phishing scam because that’s a pretty common name, but no, turns out they were just emails from HBO lol.