Ice Cube provided an update about the highly anticipated prequel to the 1995 hit stoner movie “Friday.” He also has released “Next Friday” and “Friday After Next,” but a third sequel, “Last Friday,” has reportedly been in the works for over a decade.
During an interview with “Entertainment Tonight,” the rapper said that it has been a task wrangling control of the movie. The 54-year-old co-wrote and starred in the original “Friday,” and has been trying to obtain the rights to the franchise from Warner Bros., as previously reported.
“I’m in a situation trying to get control of the movie where I can do it the way I want to do it when I want to do it,” he said. “You know, that’s been a task.”
Fans were excited after a rumor about a “Friday” prequel at HBO Max circulated on Twitter in May 2022. A fan tweet claimed that the film would star rapper Vince Staples and comedian Druski, with Cube’s son O’Shea Jackson as the scriptwriter. His father immediately dispelled those rumors with one statement: “This is blasphemy.”
But there’s been an ongoing battle between Ice Cube — whose legal name is O’Shea Jackson Sr. — and Warner Bros. over the film for years. The next “Friday” film was expected to be released on the anniversary of the original film in 2019.
By March 2021, the BIG3 CEO alleged that Warner Bros. was robbing the culture of “happiness,” due to its delays, and demanded the studio release all the rights to his films, including “The Players Club” and “All About the Benjamins.”
That same year, a report from The Wall Street Journal shared documents and letters that reveal Jackson and Warner Bros. were having “disagreements over creative direction.”
Three years later, the West Coast legend shared that they were in the “pre-production” stage and hiring people for the next “Friday” film, but fans are still yet waiting. He told TMZ earlier this year that he didn’t want to take Warner Bros to court over the rights to the film franchise, saying that the studio should grant him the rights as a courtesy.
The studio and Jackson reportedly have a contract stating that using the same characters could not be used in a new project in any capacity.
During an interview on the podcast “Hotboxin’ W/ Mike Tyson,” Jackson addressed the future of the “Friday” franchise and further blamed Warner Bros. for the delays.
“I don’t know. Warner Bros. is weird right now,” he said. “I don’t know what they doing, they don’t know what they doing. We’d love to have it back. I think it’s gon’ be close to a time when we get it back.”
He continued, “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.”
The previous films also starred Chris Tucker, Mike Epps, Nia Long, Regina King, John Witherspoon, Anthony “AJ” Johnson and Tommy “Tiny” Lister Jr. The delays resulted in several actors dying before the prequel and third sequel could be made.
Lister — who played the neighborhood bully Deebo — Witherspoon, who played Jackson’s father — and Johnson — who played Ezal — all passed away in recent years, and Jackson accused the studio of ruining the sequels with their delays.
Jackson also said that the studio should do the right thing and make the fans happy, but it doesn’t seem like the studio is greenlighting the films anytime soon.
