Old episodes of Friends are there (in cin­e­mas) for you

This week The Hol­ly­wood Reporter report­ed that Fath­om Events – the enter­tain­ment com­pa­ny known for pro­gram­ming spe­cial-engage­ment mul­ti­plex show­ings of opera, main­stream reper­to­ry film, and oth­er devi­a­tions from the week’s new releas­es – will soon bring the small screen to the sil­ver screen.

An eight-episode pack­age of Thanks­giv­ing-themed episodes from mega-pop­u­lar ​’90s sit­com Friends will play in over 700 bricks-and-mor­tar the­aters on 24 and 25 Novem­ber, a sea­son­al­ly appro­pri­ate mini-binge for the series’ many fans. This sched­ul­ing comes on the heels of a sim­i­lar exper­i­ment already proven suc­cess­ful, when Fath­om brought a 12-episode block to the­aters across three days back in Sep­tem­ber, to com­mem­o­rate the 25^th anniver­sary of the show’s debut.

That gam­bit yield­ed a $2.9 mil­lion draw, demon­strat­ing that TV can thrive at the movies, and that Amer­i­cans sure love the tele­vi­sion show Friends. Though that last point is hard­ly break­ing news; just last year, Net­flix ponied up a gar­gan­tu­an $100 mil­lion just to keep the show in their library for anoth­er twelve months.

Now that that win­dow has expired, HBO Max snatched the rights out from under their com­peti­tor for a five-year, $425 mil­lion lease. Though Net­flix has been cagey about divulging view­ing num­bers, they’ve con­firmed that the com­e­dy has with­stood as a traf­fic mag­net from month to month.

It’s a pecu­liar grass­roots phe­nom­e­non, made all the more so by the ardent fer­vor with which many cham­pi­ons of stream­ing have argued against the­atri­cal exhi­bi­tion. The talk­ing points of the pro-Net­flix side of that par­tic­u­lar debate — that there’s noth­ing one gets from a pub­lic view­ing con­text that they’re not get­ting at home — seem to have fall­en away when applied to the curi­ous case of Friends.

The suc­cess of Friends in the­aters cer­ti­fies that even stream­ing loy­al­ists will glad­ly leave the house, pay for a tick­et, and sit in a seat for a feature’s length to appre­ci­ate the advan­tages of a com­mu­nal expe­ri­ence and a two-sto­ry-tall screen. The only catch is that to lure a num­ber sig­nif­i­cant enough to make the release fis­cal­ly viable, the prop­er­ty in ques­tion has to be the most well-known sit­com of all time, or some­thing like it. No one told us life was going to be this way.