Yahoo Movies Ice Cube Wants Control of the Friday Film Franchise: 'It's My Movie'
Ice Cube is fighting for control of the Friday franchise.
The 53-year-old actor and rapper — who starred in and co-wrote the original 1995 film, as well as starred in and wrote its sequels Next Friday (2000) and Friday After Next (2002) — is on board to continue the comedic saga, but claims Warner Bros. is holding up the process.
Asked about the future of the Friday films on a recent episode of the Hotboxin' with Mike Tyson podcast, Ice Cube said, "I don't know. Warner Brothers 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 gonna be close to a time when we can 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," he continued. "It's my movie, but they have distribution control."
Reps for Warner Bros. did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.
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Nicholas Hunt/Getty Ice Cube
When Mike Tyson asked Ice Cube, who was also a producer on the Friday movies, if he'd ever consider purchasing the rights, the latter immediately replied, "I ain't putting s--- up for it. F--- no. They need to give it to me, and they're gonna make money."
"I'm not [going] to pay for my own stuff, that's stupid," he continued. "They need to do the right thing, get it to us, let us turn it into more money and make the fans happy, and people will have a good time with the series. We can do a lot with it."
Ice Cube went on to say he has written two screenplays for another Friday sequel which, if made, would come out more than two decades after the last film in the original trilogy.
And while he claimed Warner Bros. rejected the first script because "the timing wasn't right," he said the second "was in development hell."
"They just kept giving you note after note after note, never giving you the green light," Ice Cube alleged.
New Line Cinema Ice Cube and Regina King in Friday (1995)
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Chris Tucker — who starred in the first Friday film alongside Ice Cube, Nia Long, Bernie Mac, Regina King and more — reflected on his decision to back out from the subsequent sequels last year.
"One of the reasons why I didn't do the second one was because of the weed," Tucker said in a November 2021 interview with All Urban Central. "Because I said, man, that movie became a phenomenon. I don't want everybody smoking weed — and I never really told people this because I kind of forgot about it, but it was one of the reasons why I didn't do it. Because I said, 'I don't wanna represent everybody smoking weed.' "
"And that's one of the reasons why I said, 'Nah.' I didn't wanna keep doing that character. It probably was good for me because it kept me moving to the next phase and next movies," Tucker added.
The following month, Ice Cube said Tucker, 51, "didn't want to cuss or smoke weed on camera anymore."
"We were ready to pay Chris Tucker $10-12m to do Next Friday but he turned us down for religious reasons," Ice Cube also said in his tweet.
