Jennifer Aniston's Friends selfie was taken hours after HBO Max made its pitch for a reunion special

Variety

Turns out there is more to the story of Aniston's selfie that broke Instagram when she posted it on Oct. 15. "A starry group came together for a meeting at Courteney Cox’s Malibu beach house on Oct. 5, 2019. Had the papa­razzi gotten wind, pandemonium would have surely ensued," reports Variety. "Cox invited her five Friends co-stars — Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer — for a rare reunion dinner. The gathering was memorialized in a grainy six-shot selfie that Aniston posted a week later when she joined Insta­­gram. Before the former co-stars got down to reminiscing, however, there was business to attend to. The top brass from WarnerMedia had made the trek earlier in the day to Cox’s home to discuss the latest plans for the Warner Bros. TV sitcom that made its stars household names in the mid-’90s. Bob Greenblatt, Kevin Reilly and Sarah Aubrey — the executives leading the charge for WarnerMedia’s ambitious HBO Max streaming venture that bows May 27 — came by to explain exactly what the company’s new on-demand streaming service was and how it would showcase the 236-episode library of Friends. They outlined their vision for a global platform to compete with Netflix, Amazon, Disney and others in TV’s new frontier of the direct-to-consumer cavalcade. Then the trio broached the idea of some form of Friends reunion event to propel the service."