Ice Cube continues to fight for the rights to the Friday franchise after claiming in 2021 that the studio is refusing to make another sequel to the popular series.
During a new interview on the Hotboxin’ With Mike Tyson podcast, the West Coast icon admitted he doesn’t own any rights to the franchise in which he wrote and starred. According to Ice Cube, he’s still fighting for the franchise despite several scripts being ready for another film.
Ice Cube Says ‘Friday’ is “My Movie”
“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,” he said. “We’d love to have it back. I think it’s going to 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 co-wrote the first Friday movie in 1996 with DJ Pooh before taking over writing the two sequels: Next Friday in 2000 and Friday After Next in 2002. Fans have had a two-decade wait for the fourth installment, tentatively titled Last Friday.
However, Ice Cube refuses to buy the rights to the franchise from Warner Bros. in order to gain control of any future movies.
“I ain’t putting s### up for it. F### no,” he declared. “They need to give it to me, and they gon’ 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.”
Ice Cube revealed Warner Bros. turned down two scripts for the fourth Friday movie. While executives said “the timing wasn’t right” for the first iteration, the second version is stuck “in development hell.”
Check out the episode below.