‘Friends’ Reunion Special Announced for HBO Max

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Lesley Goldberg, writing at The Hollywood Reporter:

The unscripted reunion special will feature stars Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer, as well as series creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman. Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the cast, who all negotiated together, will earn more than double their former per-episode fee for the reunion and be paid between $2.5 million and $3 million for the special.
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It baffles me to think about how a one-episode special will earn HBO the probably $20-30 million they'll need to recoup from this

 

No one is going to watch this. Yes, fans wanted a reunion special, but you know, an actual scripted one where they play their characters. If we wanted to watch the cast reminisce about the good ol days, we could just watch the special features.

 

I missed the "unscripted" part first time reading this news. Well that's pointless. Do they realize in the era of social media, youtube, etc. anyone can find everything any of them have ever said since it went off the air?

 

While that would be wonderful, there is zero doubt in my mind that many people will watch this.

 

I thought unscripted meant that they would more or less improvise. I hadn't considered it would just be them talking about Friends.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure it will be disappointing either way.

 

Right...and then there's this bit of insanity: "Sources say WarnerMedia paid $85 million per year for five years ($425 million) to reclaim streaming rights to Friends for its own platform."

 

Yikes. I missed that. They're putting a LOT of weight into the hopes that Friends will be a major draw to their streaming platform. But what are they charging, like, $15 a month? That's a lot to add to people who are already paying for Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+. I imagine most of the subscribers to the streaming service will be people who are dropping the other HBO services (such as cable/satellite channels), which might make the platform's "profits" a moot point, at best.