Will Smith confirms that a ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ reunion is on the way

• Fans of the 90s sitcom ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ have been wishing for a reunion special for years.
• Now, 30 years to the day after the show debuted on NBC, Will Smith took to Instagram and confirmed that a reunion special will be arriving on HBO Max at some point in the future.
• The reunion will also feature Janet Hubert-Whitten who played the original Aunt Viv.

Will Smith today teased a forthcoming The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reunion that is set to debut on HBO Max sometime in the near future. Taking to Instagram, Smith posted a photo of the original cast, including Alfonso Ribeiro (Carlton), Karyn Parsons (Hillary), Tatyana M. Ali (Ashley), Joseph Marcell (Geoffrey), Daphne Maxwell Reid (Vivian), and Jazz.

All the more intriguing is that Smith also posted a photo of him chatting with Janet Hubert-Whitten, who you might know better as the original Aunt Viv. The pair never had the best working relationship — which is why she left the show after the third season — and had reportedly been at odds for years ever since.

“There will never be a reunion,” Hubert-Whitten said a few years back, “as I will never do anything with an (expletive) like Will Smith. This constant reunion thing will never ever happen in my lifetime unless there is an apology, which he doesn’t know the word.”

Well, apparently they’ve made amends and we’ll finally see a reunion special fans have been clamoring for for years.

Smith’s Instagram posts can be viewed below. As you’ll see, it’s remarkable that no one in the cast seems to have aged much at all. Even Geoffrey looks about the same at 72 as he did at 42.

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Incidentally, it’s not surprising that the reunion is happening on HBO Max as opposed to Netflix or NBC. Recall that The Fresh Prince has largely been absent from every major streaming platform for years. That is, of course, until HBO Max came around. And seeing as how HBO Max is just getting off the ground, putting together a highly-anticipated reunion show makes sense.

In a similar vein, HBO Max is also working on a Friends reunion special. That particular special, however, has been pushed back on account of the coronavirus. The special was originally set to shoot last month and there’s no indication as to when shooting might actually commence.

As a final point, it’s worth noting that this isn’t the only piece of Fresh Prince news we’ve seen in recent days. Earlier this week Will Smith confirmed a dramatic reboot of the original series based on a viral video that made the rounds last year.