HBO Max, which is doing fine and is not desperate at all, is offering discounted subscriptions

Things are going totally fine at HBO Max. They’re just recalibrating and trimming some fat to get lean and beach-ready for… the end of summer. It’s totally fine and normal to put high-profile original movies permanently on a shelf as a tax write-off. There’s nothing wrong with gutting a collection of original animated shows, some of which were really good and are now maybe gone forever, while bragging about “a curated collection of Magnolia Network content” in the same breath. So yeah, everything’s fine.

Unrelated: Would anyone be interested in signing up for a full year of HBO Max at a 30 percent discount? There’s no better time to check out the great content available on the service, because you never know when some of it will go away. The best time would’ve been a few weeks ago, before they started pulling shows and movies, but things are only going to get worse from here… sorry, not “worse.” We mean, you know, leaner. More cost-effective. Better for taxes (somehow).

Variety says this deal is only available to new subscribers, possibly the worst people to be advertising HBO Max to in August of 2022, and it comes down to $105 for one year with no ads or $70 for one year without ads. That’s 30 percent off of the regular price, but 42 percent off the monthly price. Are you enticed yet? Well, it gets better: The sooner you sign up, the sooner you can watch things before they get deleted. It’s like when your mom would say “come pick up this toy or it’s going in the garbage,” but then she puts it in the garbage at some point regardless of whether or not you pick it up—which is kind of the fate of all toys, isn’t it? Really makes you think.

HBO Max tells The A.V. Club that the discounted subscriptions and the decision to continue pulling shows are not related, so it’s technically just a bit of coincidental timing. Either way, the deal is only available until October, meaning it would go until October of next year if you sign up at the last possible moment, which may or may not be a clue about the timing of Warner Bros. Discovery’s combined HBO Max/Discovery+ service that’s supposed to launch next year. Like we said: There’s no better time, because it will only be worse.