That doesn’t make a lick of sense.  You can’t just change your name to get out of a contract.  There are many laws that prevent this very thing.

It didn’t sit well with me when they removed Cartoon Network content and didn’t even notify the creators. I can’t remember which show it was but the creator found out on twitter that his show wasn’t available anymore.

They removed Westworld, one of HBO's premier shows, not to mention a show like The Nevers, which I thoroughly enjoyed, where they had a whole half season unaired and sold it to The Roku channel I believe. I couldn't care less about reality shows so this merger of theirs was a definite minus for me.

Exactly. The stuff they seem to push the hardest is the furthest from what I actually want to watch. I mean, are they hoping I’ll click on it by mistake? Not all of the new content is terrible, but a lot of it is simply worthless to me. I actually like documentaries and nature shows, but Discovery network doesn’t seem…

And frickin’ remove it so you can’t even rewatch the good bits

“...in good faith, we’ve all got to fight to get this resolved.”

This is what happens when you cancel Westworld season five after telling me for six or seven years that it’s a five season story.

That doesn’t make any sense. Any content developed as a streaming original is paid for like any other streaming-only show. Any content developed for/broadcast on the linear channel gets paid for like any broadcast content.

I’m on the verge of canceling myself and I’ve been subscribed continually to HBO for over a decade. Righteous Gemstones was the last thing keeping me. 

Yeah this is not a claim I’ve heard anywhere. My understanding was they dropped the HBO brand because they thought it alienated the women they were hoping to bring in with discovery+ content.

I think it’s fair to say everyone I know (men, women, and enbys) who saw this slide found it mildly insulting, but...that’s…

Well, that’s sort of their point: the friction of having to install and log into a new app is exactly the kind of thing that could get users to abandon the service, so they’re essentially bragging that it could’ve been so much worse.

“The migration to Max has gone exceedingly well with the overwhelming majority of subscribers in the US successfully transferred,” WBD CEO David Zaslav said during the earnings call.

It’s a little like Mercedes deciding to change their name to “NiceCar” (except “Nice” isn’t Mercedes’s low-end brand like Cinemax). Like, did the execs not realize the name equity they had in HBO?

I love HBO. I hate being exposed to Discovery crap like “Dr. Pimple Popper” every time I try to watch prestige HBO shows like The Righteous Gemstones.

It’s so silly. They have one great prestige brand (HBO), which they’ve been systematically downgrading now to the point where it isn’t part of the branding at all. The new branding in fact much more closely evokes one of their very worst brands (Cinemax).

I’d push back a bit on it being a pop culture phenomenon, if that is taken to mean something grassroots.

It’s entirely manufactured by Warner Brothers. There’s ample evidence that they pit Barbie against Oppenheimer to spite Nolan for leaving them back in 2021. In fact, Oppenheimer’s release date was revealed back then…

countercountercounterpoint and also derailed from the primary topic

Barbie’s timing, has everything to do with Nolan himself and his past relationship with Warner Brothers. Normally releasing a movie like that is a terrible idea the same day as another movie unless you just don’t care a ton about the success of said…

Counterpoint: one of the biggest movies of the year is a biopic about a physicist and the morality and politics around his work. Art and profit are not an inverse relationship. Pandering to the lowest common denominator often drives off anyone with an intellect above that of a potato.

Oh, no, it’s WAY worse than that. Just listen to him:

The cleaning vs rental price differentiation is a purely artificial concept if the guest has to pay for both no matter what.