Friends fans are freaking out—and rightly so. A now-viral movie trailer has surfaced teasing a long-awaited Friends reunion movie, and fans have been in a frenzy before quickly finding out that the trailer for the Friends movie is not the real deal.
It has been 14 years since Friends went off the air. The Emmy-winning NBC sitcom about a group of New York City friends starred David Schwimmer, Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, and Matt LeBlanc, and it made the cast household names—and television’s first $6 million dollar-per-episode cast. Friends ran for 10 seasons and logged a whopping 236 episodes during its original run.
While the Friends gang was in their twenties when the show debuted in 1994, they are now in their late forties and early fifties, so a lot has happened to Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe and Joey in the 24 years since we first met them.
And now, a new faux movie trailer for Friends: The Movie is imagining the group as middle-aged friends. The now-viral trailer, which you can see below, has fans freaking out over the possibility of a Friends reunion movie. While the trailer is not real, it is edited using footage from the Friends cast’s scenes in subsequent shows and some fans are under impression that it’s the real deal.
The fan-made Friends trailer already has more than 3 million views. The 3-minute clip shows Phoebe and Monica (Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox) exchanging words in a dermatologist’s office, Joey and Ross (Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer) reuniting at a club, and Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) acting as Monica’s therapist as she talks about her relationship with her “ex” (Matthew Perry).
But of course, diehard followers of the Friends cast will recognize these scenes from the actor’s post-Friends shows, including Cox’s Cougar Town and LeBlanc’s Joey and Kudrow’s Web Therapy.
While the Friends: The Movie trailer isn’t the real deal, Friends fans have now taken to social media to rally for a Friends reunion movie—and to express their disappointment after realizing a real film is not actually in the works.
I keep seeing this Friends movie trailer, but they kind of ripped my heart out when it shows how happy they are when they run into each other which insinuates they aren't as close as they once were and I just turn into a big ball of sadness and anger.
— Q (@qburdd) January 20, 2018
This friends movie better not be a fake because I’m now emotionally invested and idk if I can go through another heartbreak
— Tricetone (@rawr_im_tina) January 21, 2018
Finding out that they made a 'Friends' movie and then finding out it was a hoax within the course of 3 minutes was not the way I wanted to wake up today, I'm going to be emotionally unavailable for a week now
— Alex Davis (@alexxdavis65) January 20, 2018
my brother fell for one of those fake trailers for a Friends movie and when I pointed out that it was just clips from the cast's other movies he just looked stunned
— Guy (@yeblod) January 20, 2018
The year is 2070. The entire cast of Friends is dead. Your Facebook friends are still falling for the fake movie trailers.
— Meg (@mollyfinn_x) January 20, 2018
During a time when reunions of iconic TV casts are becoming commonplace—look no further than the recent Will & Grace and Roseanne revivals—it’s not a shock that Friends fans are hoping for the same thing. Unfortunately, a faux movie trailer might be the closest thing Friends fans get to a real reunion.
Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman previously told E! News a TV reunion or movie will never happen, and in an interview with ABC News, Matthew Perry downplayed the chance of a reunion of the Central Perk gang, saying he wouldn’t want to ruin the show’s legacy.
“It would be terrible to do something and have it not be good,” the Friends star told ABC. “It was so terrific. If we did a movie and it sucked, then it would, you know, blemish it.”
Check out the “trailer” for the Friends movie below.