June 8 is when we celebrate Best Friends Day – one of the most trending, or as the media calls it, hashtag holidays. It goes back to 1935 when the U.S. Congress devoted a day to paying tribute to friendship. June 8 was selected because it usually had pleasantly warm weather in most of the country, perfect for outdoor parties.

Throwing an outdoor party for close friends is not the only way to appreciate them. Watching a movie about great friendships can be a nice alternative.

Friendships can be complicated. Even Aristotle could not find a unified term to describe them, saying that there were friendships of utility, friendships for pleasure, and perfect friendships. Moreover, each good drama is either about the end or the beginning of “a beautiful friendship.” But let’s look at the best movie friendships that never change.

Animation has always been about friendship. Just think of such dynamic duos and trios from both classic and recent hits as Marlin and Dory in Finding Nemo, Timon and Pumbaa in The Lion King, Judy and Nick in Zootopia, Raya and Tuk Tuk in Raya and the Last Dragon, Mulan and Mushu in Mulan, Luca, Alberto, and Giulia in Luca, and even less obvious and larger groups of friends such as the Minions and Gru whose highly anticipated new installment Minions: The Rise of Gru is set for theatrical release on July 1.

 

 

Another movie that is out on the big screen next weekend – Lightyear – is Pixar’s spinoff of Buzz Lightyear from 1995’s Toy Story – one of the most iconic stories of friendship of all time. Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear started as frenemies, but their relationship developed into a great friendship which is beautifully described in Randy Newman’s song You’ve Got a Friend in Me which became a musical leitmotif throughout the whole Toy Story franchise: “And as the years go by, our friendship will never die, you are gonna see it’s our destiny, you’ve got a friend in me.”

 

One more iconic duo of E.T. and Elliott from the Golden Globe-nominated film by Steven Spielberg, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, celebrates its 40^th anniversary this weekend, and there are even more BFFs (Best Friends Forever) from wildly different backgrounds in sci-fi and fantasy movies.

 

First introduced to the world 45 years ago, the Han Solo and Chewbacca relationship has developed over time across the films in the Star Wars universe. None of Han Solo’s quips warms the heart quite like “Chewie, we’re home.”

 

Curiously, if we look at superhero or spy movies, we see that special agents and spies like James Bond, Ethan Hunt, and Jason Bourne, as well as most superheroes, tend to act on their own. Nevertheless, there is a Marvel movie spotlighting friendship as its main theme. The Guardians of the Galaxy characters have differing backgrounds which are not supposed to work on paper, though they have ended up being the best example of friendship in the superhero genre. We will have a chance to see the superhero squad again very soon in the next installment of Thor: Love & Thunder that is coming to theaters on July 8. Hopefully, we’ll see even more of an entertaining friendship between Thor and Rocket that developed pretty fast after they first met each other in Avengers: Endgame.

 

Speaking of action movies, Top Gun: Maverick follows one of the most iconic BFF bromances in the history of films: set 36 years ago, it made people feel for the frenemy bromance between Maverick (Tom Cruise) and Iceman (Val Kilmer), and the strong brotherhood between Maverick and Goose (Anthony Edwards), both in good and devastating times. “Talk to me, Goose” is still resonating with us after all those years.

 

There are a couple of other films that come to mind with regards to BFF bromance. More than twenty years ago, in 2001, Steven Soderbergh’s heist comedy Ocean’s 11 was released, and it gave us the perfect duo of Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) that remains incomparable in the genre till today.

 

That same year, the first of the illegal street racing films – Fast and Furious – was released with the now-legendary duo of Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) and Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) who used to say: “I don’t have friends, I got family.” This BFF survived through seven installments till the tragic death of Paul Walker. Wiz Khalifa’s “I’ll See You Again” from the Furious 7 soundtrack became a tribute to Walker and it had a line encompassing the entire BFF essence: “And what’s small turned to a friendship, a friendship turned to a bond, and that bond will never be broken…”

 

There is another meaning for BFF — Best Female Friend — and this is an entirely different best friends movie genre. And the list of iconic movie BFFs can be long: from Lorelei (Marylin Monroe) and Dorothy (Jane Russell) in the 1953 musical comedy film Gentlemen Prefer BlondesGossip Girl, or Beverly Hills royalty Cher (Alicia Silverstone) and Dionne (Stacey Dash) who defined BFF in 1995’s Clueless as follows: “She’s my friend because we both know what it’s like to have people be jealous of us.”

 

One of the most recent additions to the list of iconic besties are Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) in Olivia Wilde’s feature debut Booksmart; Jules (Hunter Schafer) and Rue (Zendaya) in Sam Levinson’s Euphoria, or Elena Greco (Margherita Mazzucco) and Lila Cerullo (Gaia Girace) from the heartbreaking adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend produced by Paolo Sorrentino for HBO Max.

 

There are also BFF trios like Annie (Diane Keaton), Brenda (Bett Midler) and Elise (Goldie Hawn) who reunite after losing touch in college and team up to get revenge on their husbands in 1996’s The First Wives Club, or the high-school clique of Regina George (Rachel McAdams), Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried) and Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert), known as Plastics in 2004’s Mean Girls.

 

It should be said that the cast of the iconic Friends and Sex and the City proved that a group of pals can be just as important as one ride-or-die BFF. Lena Dunham’s Girls might be another example: six seasons of this show were focused on a bunch of mid-twenties Brooklynites trying to figure out what the modern day’s friendship is supposed to be.

 

Netflix’s Sex Education about a group of highschoolers set up to sell sex advice depicts another foundation for an unlikely friendship between Maeve (Emma Mackey), Otis (Asa Butterfield) and Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), which is fundamentally different from another iconic BFF trio of Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) who continually put their lives in jeopardy for each other since their first meeting, or Netflix’s hit Stranger Things that proves that friendship does not know age or any other stereotypes.