It’s been almost 20 years since the debut of Ice Cube’s Friday After Next, the third film released under the “No Vaseline” rapper’s Friday franchise. As a result, there has been major speculation on when the next movie will be released, and during an episode of the Drink Champs podcast at L.L. Cool J’s Rock The Bells festival, Cube shares the reason behind the hold-up.
“I’m tryna get it out of Warner Bros. They don’t believe in the culture, man,” Ice Cube said to the podcast hosts, N.O.R.E. & D.J. E.F.N.
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The 53-year-old Los Angeles native also revealed that Warner Bros. has distribution rights to the Friday films. “Once I take the character’s names, it becomes a property of Friday,” Cube added about people asking him to possibly change the film’s name. “It’s useless. They just need to come off that s—!”
Cube noted that Warner Bros. rejected two of his scripts for the movie. The first script included the characters Craig (Ice Cube) and Da Da (Mike Epps) going to jail for selling marijuana.
“The s— is funny,” Ice Cube said. “After they rejected it, they had all these movies about going to jail. So I was like, ‘Man, see, y’all f— me up.’ The other script was about the youngsters in the hood having beef with the OGs, and Craig has to come back and squash that. Smokey’s [Chris Tucker’s] son is the new Deebo [Tommy Lister Jr.], and he’s wilding.”
Cube added that Warner Bros’ “tripped on it,” in addition to talking about some of Friday’s prominent characters passing away, including John Witherspoon, who played Cube’s father in the films, Lister, who played Deebo, and A.J. Johnson, who played Ezal.
When asked if Tucker would star in another film, Cube said the comedian and actor hasn’t expressed full interest in doing another Friday. “Chris is slippy,” said Cube. “But me and Chris is cool.”
As far as Cube’s other notable projects like the 2002 All About The Benjamins movie and his 1998 hit film The Players Club, Cube said it’s tied up due to Warner Bros. “Once again, another Warner Bros’ f– up,” Cube concluded.
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