The long-awaited ‘Friends: The Reunion’ was not only a success for HBO Max, but also for the bank accounts of its six irreplaceable protagonists.
‘Friends: The Reunion’ came to HBO Max to the delight of fans of the David Crane and Marta Kauffman series and, now that we have new data, we understand the enthusiasm of its six irreplaceable protagonists, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer, a cast that, as expected, earned an incredible amount of money.
Although the exact figures have never been revealed, the new data continues to bring us closer to the spectacular speculated figure: the cast members are each believed to have received $2.5 million for the special.
After the bloody battle between Netflix, HBO and WarnerMedia over the custody of the series that continues to offer its fans endless marathons, It didn’t take long for the platform to make this special a reality which has been directed by Ben Winston, executive producer of the event together with the creators of the series, Marta Kauffman, David Crane and Kevin Bright.
But all this started much earlier since, as revealed by Mike Darnell, president of the television branch of Warner Bros. that is in charge of show programs, the meeting began to take shape when he arrived at the brand in 2013. “I’m a big fan of that series, almost everyone is,” he says in an interview published in Variety. “I came to Warner on the 20th anniversary of that show, and I was like, ‘We’ve got to do this. Why don’t we do it?'”
“And then about five years later, I started trying again,” he recalls. “At that time HBO Max was becoming a big thing and someone said that this time Kevin Bright was more or less interested and he got one of the cast members, David Schwimmer, to be more or less interested as well. Then it was time to go through a year and a half of negotiations“.
“I won’t go into details, but they made quite a bit of money on that special.“, he comments. “You’ve probably heard the story of their negotiations, how they all negotiated as a team during ‘Friends’. The good thing about them is that they really love each other. That’s great. It also means that every decision that is made has to be directed between the six of us, which was very difficult.”
‘Friends: The Reunion’ can be seen on HBO Max from May 2021. Fans of Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Chandler, Joey and the one with the dinosaurs who wanted everything to revolve around him, had an unavoidable date. But why do weekly articles about a series canceled 18 years ago keep appearing? The answer is simple, because you are here reading this! Just by taking a look at social networks it is easy to discover how the Kauffman and Crane sitcom has permeated the collective imagination to become a essential referential catalog for thirty-somethings who still think that, at some point, they will play ‘Coaxed’, have a table football and say the name of their true love on their wedding day.
Source: Fotogramas
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
