The ‘Friends’ reunion paid the six actors as much as $5 million apiece. But that’s a fraction of how much they earned over 27 years.
Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox and Lisa Kudrow were paid as much as $5 million each participate in a 'Friends' reunion show on HBO Max.
Terence Patrick for HBO MaxIn the opening credits of Friends, the show’s six co-stars cavort in a fountain as the show’s theme song laments the life of a twenty-something New Yorker whose “job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love-life’s DOA.”
Twenty-seven years after the sitcom debuted, its stars – and creators – are far from broke.
The much anticipated Friends Reunion, which aired Thursday on HBO Max, paid Monica, Phoebe, Rachel, Chandler, Joey and Ross up to $5 million apiece, according to one knowledgeable source. Not bad for one night’s work, but a pittance compared with what they have made across the sitcom’s nearly three-decade long run.
The wildly popular television comedy generated nearly $1.4 billion in earnings since Friends’ broadcast debut in 1994, according to Forbes estimates. Of that, Forbes estimates that the six Friends stars received nearly $816 million in pre-tax earnings, or roughly $136 million each.
The creative team of the show’s creators, David Crane and Marta Kaufman, and its co-executive producer, Kevin Bright, shared in pre-cash earnings of at least $550 million — a number insiders say is conservative.
When it aired on NBC from 1994 to 2004, Friends was an anchor of the network’s “Must-See TV” Thursday night, alongside such shows as Seinfeld, Mad About You, Will and Grace and ER. Sandwiched between Mad About You and Seinfeld, Friends drew an average of 25 million nightly viewers on its own.
But the money didn’t come pouring in right away. Warner Bros. Television licensed the 30-minute comedy to NBC; for the first four years, the production company actually lost money on the show, gambling that it would pay off later when syndication kicked in.
By the time Friends entered its fifth season, NBC was so intent on keeping the sitcom in its Thursday night lineup that it agreed to cover the costs of production. Over its 10-year broadcast run that overhead included an estimated $70 million in producer fees for Bright-Kauffman-Crane and almost $100 million for the stars, whose salaries rose from a modest $22,500 per episode fee in the first season to $1 million-a-show rate in the final two years, making Aniston, Cox and Kudrow the highest-paid actresses at that time.
The real payoff began once the show entered syndication. With nearly 100 episodes banked over those first four years, Warner Bros. had enough shows to begin selling reruns to local stations, cable networks and channels outside the U.S., and ultimately to streaming services, in a string of deals that Forbes estimates amounted to some $4.8 billion for the production company. That doesn’t include revenue from DVD sales.
The creators and cast still share the rerun spoils. After deducting costs for distribution, marketing and related administration expenses, Forbes estimates syndication proceeds of $260 million for the cast and at least $475 million for Bright-Kauffman-Crane, based on U.S. data provided by S&P Global and conversations with lawyers, agents and executives close to the deals.
Warner Bros. Television and publicists for the show’s stars and creators declined comment for this story.
After their lucrative paydays, the show’s six stars continue to work in television and film. Aniston, no doubt, has had the most financial success continuing to appear on Forbes’ list of highest paid actresses over the years. In 2017, Forbes estimated her net worth at $200 million — a figure that took into account proceeds from Friends and other acting jobs as well as modeling work and endorsements.
Most recently, Aniston landed a $1 million-per-episode payday (and an Emmy nomination) for her role as as news anchor Alex Levy on the 2019 Apple TV+ drama The Morning Show.
