Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said a “large portion” of Discovery+ and HBO Max’s 4 million overlapping subscribers are expected to drop the service a few months after the Max launch.

I suspect that the real reason that they’re renaming HBO Max to just ‘Max’ is to mitigate any damage to HBO’s public image should they decide to cancel it, which looks like a valid possibility now. (I find it pretty unlikely that the renaming is going to increase this service’s appeal, unless marketers really are that out of touch with reality.)