Every ‘90s adult has spent the last few decades dreaming of being one of the friends from Friends. After all, who wouldn’t want to live with a monkey, rarely visit your son, and constantly hang out with your couch-hogging friends at the local coffee shop? Warner Bros. has gestured toward making that dream a reality in the past, with a temporary Central Perk opening in New York in 2014 to celebrate the show’s 20th anniversary and a replica of the coffee shop popping up in Beijing a year prior, but a recent trademark request from the company suggests that it might have some bigger plans for Central Perk.
According to documents obtained by celebrity news site The Blast (via Entertainment Weekly), Warner Bros. is trying to secure a copyright to use the name Central Perk and its logo from the show for “coffee shop and café services.” The implication is that this is for something more involved than the pop-up store from 2014, but it could also just be Warner Bros. trying to secure the rights to something so nobody else can do it and/or so it can do something with it in the future. The company also apparently tried to get the rights to use Central Perk on “toys, board games, and slot machines,” which lends credence to the idea that this might not be for a specific, real-life Central Perk location.
