A “Friends” Reunion Special Might Be Coming To HBO Max

Friends ended on May 6th 2004 after ten seasons, and every day since then, fans have been begging for a reunion. And every time it’s brought up, there’s a Friends cast member who implies we’ve all got a better chance of seeing Marcel the Monkey reanimate from beyond the grave with the ghosts of the chick and the duck than we do of seeing Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe reunite on screen. Last month Jennifer Aniston threw up a picture of the whole cast on her Instagram page, and it felt like that was as close to an official reunion as anyone was going to get. Now sources are telling The Hollywood Reporter that there’s a very good chance a Friends reunion might happen on HBO Max.

Sources claim that all six core cast members – Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer – as well as Friends creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman, are all in talks for an unscripted reunion special. THR’s sources add that nothing has been decided or confirmed, and that there are still many details that need to be hammered out. And even when everything is decided and if everyone signs on, there’s still the issue of coordinating eight peoples’ schedules. And of course, there’s the chance that it could all fall through and not happen.

Not to mention that HBO Max and producers at Warner Bros. Television declined to comment when contacted by THR. So this is a project that is very early in the planning stages. So we don’t know much. But THR thinks it could be a project that would launch around the time that all those Friends re-runs move from their current home at Netflix to HBO Max after it launches in May 2020.

And while no one is really talking about this super-secret alleged project, Jennifer Aniston did hint at something on Ellen last month. When asked if the show would ever get the reboot treatment, she simply said, “No,” before adding, “We would love for there to be something, but we don’t know what that something is…We’re working on something.”

THR also pointed out that the rest of the cast has been pretty adamant that they’d never do a scripted revival or reboot of the series. So if I had to guess, this unscripted Friends reunion will probably be a one-hour special featuring the cast and creators sitting in a recreation of Central Perk, where they reminisce about everything related to Friends, and use crumpled up $100 bills to silence the sound of fans screaming for an 11th season. Well, there might be one scripted note written down on the day of filming. It would just say “NO ONE MENTION JOEY,” because we don’t talk about Joey.

Pic: NBC