Ice Cube Is Angry at Warner Bros. and Wants Them to Give Him Back the Rights to FRIDAY
Ice Cube is looking to get creative control back of his Friday film franchise from Warner Bros. Ice Cube has plans for the franchise that he’d like to move forward with, but the studio isn’t making it easy for him and he wants them to give him the rights back to the franchise.
A fourth film in the franchise titled Last Friday has been in the works, but there hasn’t been any movement on it, which has been frustrating for Cube. The actor states that the development of Last Friday is being held up by Warner Bros. He was recently a guest on Mike Tyson's Hotboxin' podcast, and while on the show, he demanded Warner Bros. give him control of the Friday franchise so he can make the next installment. He said:
"I don't know. Warner Bros. is weird right now. I don't know what they're doing. They don't know what they're doing. We'd love to have it back. I think it's going be close to a time when we get it back. So, we'll either wait for that time, or we'll keep trying to convince them that they need to let us control the movie. It's my movie, but they have distribution control."
Ice Cube also is not a fan of the idea of paying for the right to the franchise:
"I ain't putting shit up for it. Fuck no. They need to give it to me, and they're going to make money. I'm not about to pay for my own stuff, that's stupid. They need to do the right thing, get it to us, let us turn it into more money, and make the fans happy…We can do a lot with it."
You know, more of these Friday movies would make fans happy, and if WB isn’t going to do anything with it, why hold on to it? But, you know, there’s lots of legal stuff with contracts that Ice Cube signed when he made that first movie and there’s a reason why WB still has control of it because that’s what Cube originally agreed to. But, if they aren’t going to do anything with the franchise, why not let Cube run with it?
Cube previously talked about the difficulty of working with WB, saying: "I'm trying to get it out of Warner Bros. They don't believe in the culture, man.”
Cube wrote a couple more sequels for Friday that the studio rejected. When explaining why he said: "They were like, 'Yo, we don't want Craig and Day Day in jail,’ because Craig and Day Day went to jail for selling weed before it was legal."
He then added: "That shit is funny. After they rejected it, they had all these movies about going to jail. Orange Is the New Black, Get Hard, so I was like, 'Man, see, y'all fucked me up.'"
Cube's second script was "about the youngsters in the hood having beef with the OGs in the hood, and Craig has to come back and squash that. Because Smokey's [Tucker's] son is the new Deebo [Tommy Lister Jr.], and he's wilding."
In regards to that one, Cube said WB "tripped on it. They fucked around, and then John Witherspoon [who played Craig's father, Willie Jones] passed, [Lister Jr.] passed, [Ezal actor A.J. Johnson] passed. There's a lot of characters who were going to go back to the hood. They just fucked it up."
As you can see, Cube is not happy with Warner Bros. He’s pissed, but I’m sure one day he’ll get to make his next Friday movie. In the meantime, he could always start something new and tell a new story with new characters! He should just do that!