Max isn’t letting us tune into these ‘toons anymore. The 255 classic Looney Tunes shorts that survived the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned streaming service’s last purge in 2022 have also been taken down, meaning that the entirety of the original 511-episode Looney library is no longer available on the platform. Now, as longtime fans might recall, Looney Tunes was listed in a “Titles Leaving Max” section of a press release in 2023 — but the company said the title was “included in error,” insisting in a statement at the time, “This is not the case and the show will continue streaming on Max.” Why isn’t that true anymore? Does CEO David Zaslav just really not like Bugs Bunny? WBD did not immediately respond to Vulture’s request for comment, so there’s no official word on the reason for the latest abrupt removal. (Vulture previously confirmed that the last batch of Looney Tunes disappearances happened because Max’s license for those shorts expired, and the platform simply chose not to renew it.)
Since Warner Bros and Discovery merged in 2022, WBD has shelved the Wile E. Coyote movie Coyote vs. Acme and decided that The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie would not premiere on Max. (Instead, indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment released the film, which is out now in theaters.) But this doesn’t mean that WBD and Max are fully cutting ties with Looney Tunes content — as of publication time, some seasons of the franchise spinoffs, such as Baby Looney Tunes and New Looney Tunes, remain on Max. Multiple original franchise cartoons are also still available to watch on the WBD Classic and WB Kids YouTube channels. If those eventually end up getting scrubbed, too … well, guess we’ll just have to wait for public domain to kick in. It seems like the general population is more eager to own Looney Tunes than WBD is, anyway.
