Ice Cube has chosen a side in the Chris Tucker versus Mike Epps comedy debate, revealing the latter is funnier to him then the Rush Hour star.
Cube spoke his mind during a recent appearance on the Full Send podcast, and said that out of his two Friday colleagues, Epps tickles his funny bone more than Tucker does.
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“Mike, to me, is funnier, just as a pure comic,” Cube admitted, before showering Tucker with praise for his performance in the original Friday movie. He then said Epps wouldn’t have appeared as Day-Day if Tucker hadn’t bowed out of the subsequent films.
“Yeah, I’m glad he didn’t do it,” Cube said. “‘Cause we wouldn’t have Mike.”
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The N.W.A legend also confirmed that he offered Tucker $12 million to reprise his role as Smokey, but he turned down the offer for “religious reasons.”
“Yeah, we wanted him,” he said. “He turned it down. You’ll hear a thousand different stories, but we wanted to pay him $12 million to do that movie and he turned it down. He said it was for religious reasons…He didn’t wanna cuss and he didn’t wanna smoke weed on camera.”
In a 2021 Instagram Live interview, Chris Tucker explained why he decided to walk away from the Friday franchise despite the success of the first film.
“I never really told people this ’cause I kinda forgot about it … I didn’t want to represent everybody smoking weed,” he said. “I kind of made it more personal than a movie … I wanted to move on because when I did something, I never wanted to do it again. Back then, I was all about going to the next level. I had a good sense of like, ‘OK, now it’s time to go do an action movie.’”
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Tucker went on to say that he only made $10,000 for making the film, but was simply grateful for the chance to participate.
“It’s one of those things — it was just a small movie,” he continued. “We filmed it in 20 days. I got about $10,000 for it or whatever, I didn’t care. I wanted the opportunity. It was that small of a movie, but that was the beauty of it.
“It allowed me to get into character. It wasn’t no big distractions like big movie sets. You got light people and sound people and everybody wanna be a star. But that movie was just a camera and me and Cube on the porch. Magic came out of it, thank God.”
While Ice Cube is currently working to get the fourth Friday film made, the Mount Westmore rapper has run into multiple snags along the way. Most recently, he told Drink Champs that he submitted two scripts for the fourth film in the stoner comedy series, but they were both rejected by the studio.
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“I’m trying to get it out of Warner Brothers, they don’t believe in the culture man,” Cube said around the 29-minute mark, adding that the studio retains distribution rights for any sequels moving forward. “I had two scripts. I wrote one; it was the shit. They was like, ‘Yo, we don’t want Craig and Day-Day in jail, ’cause Craig and Day-Day went to jail for selling weed before it was legal!”
He continued: “Then after they rejected it they had all these fucking movies about going to jail: Orange Is The New Black …Get Hard. So then I wrote another script, and the script was really about … the youngsters in the hood having beef with the OG’s in the hood and Craig has to come back and squash that because Smokey’s son is the new Deebo and he’s wylin!
“They tripped on it man, they fucked around and then John Witherspoon passed. Then Deebo passed … they just fucked it up.”
