Ice Cube says the reason there hasn’t been a fourth movie in the ‘Friday’ franchise is that Warner Bros. won’t greenlight it.
The last installment in the franchise, ‘Friday After Next’, was released 20 years ago.
Ice Cube revealed this in an episode of the Drink Champs podcast at LL Cool J’s Rock The Bells festival.
“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.
The 53-year-old Los Angeles native explained that Warner Bros. holds 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 shit!”
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 shit 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 fuck 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.”
