Media analyst predicts HBO Max will be ‘shut down’ by end of 2027

Less than a year ago, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav stood up and announced that the company was putting “HBO” back on its streaming service. After two years of stripping the prestige brand out of the name — rebranding as simply “Max” in a move that baffled just about everyone in the industry — Zaslav called HBO “the brand that represents the highest quality in media” and said it was coming back.

This week, a Wall Street analyst said it’ll be gone by the end of next year.

“We expect HBO Max to essentially be shut down at the end of 2027,” MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman wrote in a research note this week.

‘We expect HBO Max to essentially be shut down at the end of 2027 ‘ — MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman in a research note today…

— Brian Steinberg (@bristei) March 6, 2026

Paramount won the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery last week, with the WBD board declaring David Ellison’s $31-per-share offer superior to the deal it had already struck with Netflix, and Netflix declining to counter and walking away. The months-long process that started with Netflix announcing an $82.7 billion deal in December and ran through round after round of Paramount’s hostile takeover bids ended with Ellison owning Warner Bros. and HBO, and with the question of what happens next.

His answer on the streaming side, which he laid out for analysts on Monday, is to merge HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single platform. He also said “HBO should stay HBO” and committed to letting the brand operate with some level of independence, without spelling out how a brand operating independently also gets absorbed into a combined app under Paramount’s umbrella. Nobody asked him to square that circle, and the answer isn’t coming until the deal clears regulatory approval anyway.

That said, a merged Paramount+/HBO Max is one app with one name, and it seems likely that the reborn HBO Max name is on its way out once more.