HBO Max is now simply called Max. In April 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery, the firm’s parent company, made the announcement publicly. The streaming service underwent a rebranding, which resulted in the addition of a significant amount of new material from Discovery Plus as well as new pricing structures. But who exactly is Max? The new service incorporates both new and established components, in addition to newly developed programming. In this article, we will discuss what’s new on HBO Max, the Best movies, TV shows, and series, and the HBO movie premiere schedule.
Brief History of HBO
The widely used streaming service HBO Max rebranded as “Max” on Tuesday. The new brand, Warner Bros. Discovery, emerged last month, along with plans to combine the HBO Max and Discovery+ content libraries.
However, the rebranding, first reported by CNBC in April, is meant to convey the message that Max is a family-friendly streaming service that provides more than just prestige dramas like “Succession” and “The Sopranos.”
The removal of HBO from the name aims to protect the HBO brand’s reputation from association with demeaning TLC shows like “Dr. Pimple Popper” and “My 600-Lb. Life.”
“HBO is not TV. Warner Bros. Discovery’s president of streaming, JB Perrette, declared last month, “HBO is HBO.” We won’t put too much strain on it by expecting it to process all of this additional material at once. But the rebranding encompasses far more than just a new, shorter name.
What is Max?
Max is the brand-new streaming service that Warner Bros. Discovery offers. It takes the place of HBO Max and brings some of the material from Discovery Plus into its own offering, making it a more comprehensive subscription package overall.
The program, which is really just a renamed version of HBO Max, provides on-demand access to a huge library of television series and movies. This includes content that Max created, content from the Warner Bros. archive, content from HBO, Discovery, CNN, and the CW, as well as licensed TV shows and movies, among other content.
Is Max Good?
Unfortunately, the days of HBO Max being one of the best streaming services online are over.
So, why isn’t this once-popular service popular anymore? The decline started in 2022, when HBO Max stopped airing several of its original series. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), the parent company of HBO, is not the only corporation to remove original streaming content that was originally thought to live on the platform indefinitely.
In May 2023, WBD made another monumental shift by rebranding their service from “HBO” to “Max.” Instead of just changing the name, consumers had to download a new app in addition to HBO Max, and it was significantly inferior to the original.
Even if the newly renamed Max is a good place to view a lot of DC, Discovery, and even HBO shows, that may not be enough for certain customers.
What’s New on HBO Max?
Since many Discovery programs can be found on Max, we can only hope you enjoy them. As a group, we also mean quite a bit. Except for the first of the month, when Max adds many movies from the Warner Bros. cinema collection and a few films from other studios, these shows and movies far outshine anything HBO has to offer in August. The rivalry between the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers throughout the 1980s is explored in detail in the second season of Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, another of HBO’s defining series.
The question of whether or not Max is still worth the price remains a matter of taste. HBO’s original programming and film library are unrivaled, but we are not fans of Discovery’s “reality” programming. Whatever the case, you can find every new HBO and Max show that will air this month on our comprehensive list. Any titles sans “HBO” in the listing are exclusive to Max. The movies and shows we think you should watch are highlighted.
Best Movies on HBO Max
After viewing HBO’s After the Bite, you might decide to brave the summer heat and not enjoy a refreshing plunge at the beach. The latest documentary to join our list of the best movies on HBO and Max is about the aftermath of a fatal great white shark attack in a small Cape Cod community in 2018. You can always toss on Avatar: The Way of Water if you’d prefer to dive in headfirst without worrying about sharks.
An explanation of the selection process: To keep it current, we’ve focused on movies that have recently been added to HBO/Max and new releases, but we’ve also included others that we think you’ll find interesting. We’ll update it on a regular basis. Here are the top 7 best movies on HBO Max
#1. After the Bite
This documentary examines the problem of increasing numbers of great white sharks and how a single fatal attack in a Cape Cod town left residents unsure of how to address it from multiple angles, including the management of seal populations, avoiding the ocean, and the impact of climate change. What stands out, though, is the philosophically significant question of what kind of relationship humans ought to have with the natural world.
Year: 2023
Director: Ivy Meeropol
Genre: Documentary
Rating: NR
Metacritic score: 70
#2. Avatar: The Way of Water
The second installment of James Cameron’s Avatar felt like it had been in the works for decades. In truth, it was only a little over a decade between the release of the first film in 2009 and the release of The Way of the Water in 2018. To sum up the time frame: Set 16 years after the events of the first film, the sequel finds Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) married, with children, and still blue. This is the second of five planned films in the series. Despite not appearing to create as big of a mark as the first film, Avatar 2 has become the third highest-grossing film of all time (behind only Avatar and Avengers: Endgame), surpassing Cameron’s own Titanic and all the Star Wars films.
Year: 2022
Director: James Cameron
Stars: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, and Stephen Lang
Genre: Drama, Sci-Fi
Rating: PG-13
Metacritic score: 67
#3. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
This moving documentary on the life of legendary artist and activist Nan Goldin is up for Best Documentary at the 2023 Academy Awards. She discusses her sister’s death, her time spent in LGBTQ subcultures in New York City, and her decision to make it her life’s work to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid problem through a series of personal interviews and artfully crafted slideshows. It’s not just a strong contender for best documentary of 2022; it’s also a strong contender for best film of 2022.
Year: 2022
Director: Laura Poitras
Stars: Nan Goldin
Genre: Documentary
Rating: NR
Metacritic score: 90
#4. Reality
There was a leak of a confidential report in 2017 that revealed Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. Former NSA translator Reality Winner (yep, that’s her real name) was given the harshest term ever given to a government whistleblower when she was given more than five years in prison for the crime a year later. Sydney Sweeney, HBO’s reigning muse (Euphoria, The White Lotus), is fantastic in this riveting true story, which unfolds mostly in real time over the course of the FBI’s more than an hour-long interrogation of the 25-year-old.
Year: 2023
Director: Tina Satter
Stars: Sydney Sweeney, Josh Hamilton, John Way, Marchánt Davis, and Benny Elledge
Genre: Drama
Rating: NR
Metacritic score: 84
Alexei Navalny is one of the few Russian politicians and activists openly opposing Vladimir Putin’s leadership and hence poses the greatest threat to Putin. He has been blacklisted by government media and arrested by bogus courts for encouraging others to reject Putin’s authoritarianism, but that’s the easy part of the world’s most dangerous career. In 2020, Navalny was almost killed after he was exposed to a nerve agent developed in a laboratory. His backers blamed the Kremlin, although they denied involvement in any way. It examines Navalny, the poisoning, and the difficulties of resisting Putin in this award-winning documentary (including Best Documentary at the 2023 Academy Awards), which premiered before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Year: 2022
Director: Daniel Roher
Stars: Alexei Navalny
Genre: Documentary
Rating: NR
Metacritic score: 82
#6. This Place Rules
Viral Andrew Callaghan, a YouTube guerrilla journalist, examines the roots of the January 6 Capitol riots in this documentary film that continues his deep, immersed dive into far-right and far-left ideology. Callaghan is able to speak with some notable figures (Alex Jones, Proud Boys leader Henry Tarrio), but it is his interactions with the more ordinary extremists, such as the elementary school student who was taught that some members of the government are reptilian humanoids, that stand out. Callaghan, in contrast to many of his fellow web journalists, isn’t out for attention but rather to provide context. And the things he reveals to us are at once astonishing, funny, scary, and tragic.
Year: 2022
Director: Andrew Callaghan
Genre: Documentary
Rating: TV-MA
Metacritic score: n/a
#7. The Banshees of Inisherin
The Banshees of Inisherin, one of the best HBO Max movies of 2022, is set on a desolate Irish island that begins to break apart when its two main residents, played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, quit getting along with each other. It wasn’t an amicable split: Farrell’s Pádraic is a low-key guy who finds pleasure in the company of his miniature pony and afternoon beer with Gleeson’s Colm. But Colm realizes that his time is limited, and he doesn’t want to waste it on someone he considers a lost cause.
Colm makes it crystal clear what he is willing to do to persuade Pádraic to leave him alone, leaving Pádraic bewildered and devastated. Set against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War, it is a heartbreaking and darkly humorous look at how relationships and perceptions change as people age.
Year: 2022
Director: Martin McDonagh
Stars: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, and Barry Keoghan
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Rating: R
Metacritic score: 87
New HBO Series 2023
There is an overwhelming amount of television to watch, making it difficult to determine which HBO Max shows and series are worth your time. The issue is that there are currently around 12,349 streaming providers, and new shows are continually being added to all of them. Even if you trust the opinions of your friends and family, they probably haven’t seen every show out there. To help you go through it all, we’ve compiled this list; however, today we’re here to talk about HBO in particular, so that’s what we’ll be focusing on. Actually, we just watch everything on HBO Max, so both versions of HBO are included here. Here are the best new shows and series hitting HBO Max this year:
- The Last of Us. For once, a video game version of The Last of Us succeeds. We can only give thanks that it did. The first season of this drama, which stars Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, will premiere in 2023, but episodes are now available to view online.
- White House Plumbers. Like Veep, but set during the Watergate scandal, this seems like it would be a lot of fun to watch. Premiering in March, it features Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux as the scandal’s ringleaders.
- Hacks’ season 3. Our heroines of Hacks season 2 hit the road, and I can’t wait to see what happens in season 3 after they ended the season (spoiler alert) on such rocky terms.
- ‘And Just Like That…, season 2. Listen up. Some may not consider this show to be good, yet in that regard, it excels. It’s so absurd that you can’t help but laugh at it. It’s so pervasive in online conversation that you need to follow it to participate. And Aidan has returned!
What Is Coming to HBO Max in 2023?
HBO Max’s February 2023 lineup will feature new episodes of returning series, premieres of holiday-themed specials, and movies up for Academy Awards. The Last of Us, which had an unprecedented increase in viewers for its second episode, and Velma, an original series, both premiered as part of HBO Max in January 2023, ushering in the new year in style. This month also saw the addition of The Menu (2022) and the John Wick series to HBO Max, with many more classics and new releases scheduled for the coming month.
On February 7th, 2023, Sam Mendes’ drama Empire of Light, for which Roger Deakins was nominated for Best Cinematography, and HBO’s documentary All That Breathes, nominated for Best Documentary Feature, will both have their streaming premieres on HBO Max. Both the Season 10 premiere of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and the premiere of Harley Quinn: A Very Problematic Valentine’s Day Special will air on HBO Max in 2023. As of February 1st, subscribers can still watch American Black Film Festival shorts and Oscar nominees The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, and Navalny.
Here’s everything else coming to HBO Max in 2023.
- A Vigilante, 2018 (HBO)
- Acts of Vengeance, 2017 (HBO)
- Blame it on Rio, 1984 (HBO)
- Bride Wars, 2009 (HBO)
- Come and Find Me, 2016 (HBO)
- Cooties, 2014 (HBO)
- Don’t Play Us Cheap, 1972
- Factual: Love Off The Grid, Season 1
- Food: Hungry for Answers
- Goldeneye, 1995 (HBO)
- Good Boy!, 2003 (HBO)
HBO Max TV Shows
HBO is not short on quality programming; in fact, it’s easy to find several excellent TV shows to watch. The platform has proven itself worthy of the premium TV label, and its streaming service now features both old favorites like Friends and cutting-edge works like Succession and The White Lotus, both of which have won Emmys. In addition, there’s a plethora of high-quality material to pick from: Get started with HBO Max by checking out our favorite TV shows below.
- Chernobyl (2019)
- The Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge (2023)
- Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy (2021-2022)
- A Black Lady Sketch Show (2019-present)
- Full Circle (2023)
- VGLY (2023-present)
- Swiping America (2023-present)
- SmartLess On the Road (2023)
- The Idol (2023–present)
- Pushing Daisies (2007-2009)
HBO Movie Premiere Schedule
With fresh debuts of original releases like Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty: Season 2 and the documentary film BS High, the August 2023 Max calendar is serving up great titles all month long. This month marks the debut of Max, a streaming service that boasts a plethora of original, high-quality content. This includes the premieres of Max Originals such as A Scent of Time, MarkKim + Chef, and Adventure Time: Fionna & Cake: Season 1, as well as countless other classic titles from HBO and Discovery+.
So, if you’re looking for something new to watch on Max, check out this month’s releases. We’ve got the complete August 2023 lineup and premiere schedule for HBO Max, plus reviews of the top new movies and TV shows:
#1. BS High
In BS High, an HBO Original Documentary Film, we go behind the scenes of the rich and nasty world of football prep programs, where promising young athletes’ careers and reputations may take off—or crash and burn—on the path to the NFL. After suffering a humiliating 58-0 loss (and multiple injuries) at the hands of prep powerhouse IMG Academy, Bishop Sycamore High School became the focus of an investigation.
Fans instantly began to doubt Bishop Sycamore’s football team and its head coach, Roy Johnson, after the lopsided victory and chaotic performance. When BS High comes on Max later this month, you can dive headfirst into the entire gripping narrative.
#2. The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty
The incredibly prestigious HBO The second season of the original sports drama Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty premieres in early August and promises to be better than the first. The show is a fictitious portrayal of the 1980s era of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball franchise. Season 2 will take place between 1980 and 1984, culminating in the first professional rematch between Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah) and Larry Bird (Sean Patrick Small). Season 1 focuses on the 1979–1980 time period, which saw the beginning of Jerry Buss’ (John C. Reilly) tenure as team owner and Magic Johnson’s (Quincy Isaiah) NBA career.
#3. Rap Sh!t
The brilliant Issa Rae’s Max Original music-comedy series Rap Sh!t follows Mia Knight (Aida Osman) and Shawna Clark (KaMillion), two former high school classmates who reunite to form a rap group. The show’s second season finds the team stepping up their game in pursuit of their ambition of making it big in the music industry while facing more turmoil, challenges, and expectations along the way.
HBO Max Premier Schedule for 2023 Releases: Full List
Releases in August from Max range from original series premieres to critically acclaimed theatrical films. This is a complete rundown of every new Max release this month, with dates and times.
- Agent Cody Banks (2003)
- Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London (2004)
- A Hologram for the King (2016)
- Before Midnight (2013)
- Best Man Down (2013)
- Beyond the Reach (2015)
- Chernobyl Diaries (2012)
- Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (2010)
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)
- Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
- De-Lovely (2004)
- Deadfall (2012)
- Fame (2009)
- Fargo (1996)
- Flash of Genius (2008)
- F/X (1986)
- Ice Station Zebra (1968)
- Infinitely Polar Bear (2015)
- Inside Job (2010)
Is HBO Free With Amazon Prime?
No. If you pay an additional subscription for Amazon Prime Video, you have the option of adding HBO as one of the numerous channels. You will have access to live HBO programming as well as movies and episodes that can be accessed on demand if you subscribe to this channel, which costs $14.99 per month.
What Is Leaving Max in July 2023?
The following is a list of films and TV episodes (including Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity) that will be removed from Max in July 2023.
A few days remain for viewers to catch Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in “Gravity,” an acclaimed 2013 science fiction thriller. After their shuttle is destroyed in space, two astronauts are left to fend for themselves. It was lauded for its technical feats and the performances of its principal actors, earning seven Academy Awards, including Best Director for Alfonso Cuarón.
In addition to 50 First Dates, American Sniper, Casino Royale, The Fault in Our Stars, and Yesterday, a number of additional popular films will be removed from Max in July 2023.
TV Series and Movies Leaving Max in July 2023
- Dr. Stone (2019)
- Family Tree (2013)
- The Night House (2021)
- The Problem with Apu (2017)
- Gravity (2013)
- Vacation (2015)
- Top Gear (Seasons 28–30)
Bottom Line
While HBO Max isn’t inexpensive, the service’s extensive library more than makes up for its price. Over the years, HBO Max has amassed a library of original series, movies, and children’s programming that stands among the best in the industry.
In contrast, HBO Max is a premium streaming service that will offer thousands of hours of entertainment at an affordable price. It’s unfortunate that HBO Max doesn’t provide a trial period, but the service is sure to be worthwhile for the vast majority of viewers. If you don’t already get HBO through your cable company, we think it’s worth the extra $15 per month to watch without commercial interruptions.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is on HBO Max and Not HBO?
All of HBO Max and Discovery+’s content is available on Max. That includes shows like “Love It or List It,” “90 Day Fiancé,” “Dr. Pimple Popper,” and “Guy’s Grocery Games,” as well as “Succession,” “Hacks,” and “The Last of Us.” However, it also features a wide variety of new and old Warner Bros.
Does HBO Max Have New Movies?
Yes. Every month, Warner Bros. and HBO classic movies and TV episodes are among the latest additions to Max’s extensive library of unique material.
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