Ice Cube has vowed to continue pushing to regain control of the Friday franchise, even if he is unwilling to take his battle with Warner Bros. Studios to court.
The rapper-turned-film executive spoke recently spoke with a TMZ reporter who sparked the conversation by asking if it was possible for Ice Cube to revive the series under a different name. He reiterated as he’s previously stated that Warner Bros. owns not only the name of the fan favorite franchise, but also the names of the characters.
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“You gotta use the same [intellectual property],” Cube stated. “Can’t call it Saturday without using Craig and Day-Day. So it’s the same thing really.”
While vowing to continue fighting for ownership of the series, for which he wrote each of the three screenplays, Ice Cube made it clear that he’s not interested in entering into a legal battle with his former studio partners. What he is willing to do, however is “convince Warner Bros. that they’re wrong.”
Ice Cube first confirmed that he was working on a fourth film in the collection, titled Last Friday, during a late night interview in 2017. However, in the five plus years since, that film has yet to materialize.
During a live taping of Drink Champs at the Rock The Bells festival in October, Cube explained that he has in fact presented two scripts to the studio, both of which were rejected.
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“I’m trying to get it out of Warner Brothers, they don’t believe in the culture man,” Cube, 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!”
Cube went on to explain that the studio continued to delay approving his script ideas until both John Witherspoon and Tommy Lister Jr. died, which impacted his original vision for the fourth installment.
In December, he told Mike Tyson that while he remains hopeful that Warner Bros. will eventually allow him to reclaim the Friday franchise, Ice Cube is not willing to buy the intellectual property back.
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“I ain’t putting shit up for it. Fuck no,” he said. “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.”
