The movie Courteney Cox will always regret never making: “I wish we could do that”
If the image of Gale Weathers, the strong-minded news reporter in the Scream franchise, isn’t the first character that comes to mind when you think of Courtney Cox, then it’s got to be Monica Geller.
So successful was Friends that you could call yourself a ‘Monica’ and even people who hadn’t seen the show would have a vague idea of what you meant, and decades on, she remains a particular fan favourite. Friends ran for ten seasons, beginning in 1994, and it fundamentally changed television forever.
For the first time, really, a sitcom’s sole focus was on the act of assembling a group of friends who were like family. The core group represented a new vision of 20-something-year-olds living in the big city, their hangouts within their apartments or the local coffee shop, making a change from the tradition of sitcoms being set within a family or work setting. These were young people figuring out life in a way that hadn’t been shown quite like this before, and it became a huge success as a result.
Yet, there was one thing that Friends never did: a movie. A spin-off film is something that we’ve come to expect from many successful TV shows over the years, and they invariably differ in quality. David Lynch did an incredible job when he made Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a prequel to Twin Peaks that stood as a work of art in its own right, but then there are movies like Sex and the City 2, an awful sequel to an era-defining TV show that significantly destroyed the legacy of the once-brilliant series.
Perhaps, then, it’s good that a Friends movie was never made, but that didn’t stop Cox from wishing that she’d been a part of one. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, she once reflected on these movie adaptations that the Sex and the City cast indulged in, stating, “I wish we could do that with Friends“.
However, she knew that it probably wouldn’t have been the greatest of ideas, really, because “the characters from Sex And The City hopped all over Manhattan. On Friends, we were always stuck in the apartment and that coffee house.”
Sex and the City might’ve found success with its first movie sequel, which saw Carrie jilted at the altar by Mr Big, but when Sex and the City 2 rolled around in 2010, the pair now married, everything collapsed in on itself, and it was terrible, and I’m saying that as a SATC superfan.
The leading ladies find themselves in Abu Dhabi this time around, but the film is packed with culturally insensitive moments, and not even Liza Minnelli’s so-bad-it’s-good cover of ‘Single Ladies’ by Beyoncé, which she performs at a gay wedding at the start of the film, is enough to save it.
At least the characters got to reunite on screen for more adventures, which Cox couldn’t help but feel a little jealous of. “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” she said back in 2010, “Would [David Crane and Marta Kauffman] want to write it? Because they’d have to be involved. I don’t know…a lot of things would have to break just right for it to work. But we’ve daydreamed about it.”
