It's been rumoured for years and now it's official: There's finally a Friends reunion happening!
HBO Max, HBO's new streaming service, has confirmed Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer will star in what's being billed as a reunion to celebrate the original series. It will be filed at Stage 24 on the Warner Bros. Studio lot where the beloved TV show was shot in Burbank, Calif.
It had been rumoured the reunion would be unscripted, and that is indeed the case. It will also only be available to HBO Max subscribers, as will every single episode of Friends. The reunion plus the entire series will hit the streaming platform in May.
"I became aware of Friends when it was in the very early stages of development and then had the opportunity to work on the series many years later and have delighted in seeing it catch on with viewers generation after generation," Kevin Reilly, HBO Max's Chief Content Officer and President of TBS, TNT and truTV, said in a statement. "It taps into an era when friends–and audiences–gathered together in real time and we think this reunion special will capture that spirit, uniting original and new fans."
All the original cast members confirmed the reunion by posting a picture of them in a car, or hanging on to its side (in David's case)–except for LeBlanc, who shared a picture of the cast of M*A*S*H. That's got to be the most Joey thing ever.
Earlier this year, there was lots of speculation about how much the former Friends cast members could bank for the special. Each star famously received US$1 million per episode during the tenth and final season of the TV show. Reports earlier this month, when the reunion was merely a rumour, suggested the cast could make anywhere between US$2.5 million to US$4 million each, and now Variety says they will each take home at least US$2.5 million for participating.
Whispers of a Friends reunion ramped up when Aniston joined Instagram in October and shared a photo of herself with the rest of the cast.
They all remain, well, friends, but haven't been back together for any related project since the series went off the air in 2004. Since then, they've all been very successful in their own right, with Aniston recently winning a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance in Apple TV's The Morning Show.
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