When Home Box Office announced they were shutting down HBO Now and HBO Go and combining them into a single service called HBO Max, it struck a lot of us as an unnecessary complication, especially since the app wasn’t initially available on all platforms. What was this, exactly, aside from a name change?
We needn’t have worried. HBO Max turned out to be everything the prior services were, plus: a broad selection of classic Warner content from Looney Tunes to the golden age of Hollywood; third party content from studios and hosts like Comedy Central, Studio Ghibli, and the Sesame Workshop; an expanded slate of homegrown “Max Originals.”
HBO Max has a massive library of subscription-based streaming content; so much so that Netflix is its only peer in regards to sheer scope and volume. And although that library is shrinking—one of many fallouts from the ongoing merge of Discovery+ and HBO Max–it’s largely at the expense of shows and movies that no one was watching anyway, according to a report from Variety.
By that logic, the action movies on this list should be safe from the ax. They are all certified crowd pleasers that bring the adrenaline, the violence, the high-speed car chases, and the quippy one-liners to break it all up. Here are the 20 best action movies that you can watch, right now, on HBO Max.
