Warner Bros. said “bye, Felicia” to two different Friday sequel scripts, according to star and co-writer Ice Cube. The rapper and actor co-wrote all three Friday films — the 1995 cult-classic stoner comedy and its sequels, 2000’s Next Friday and 2002’s Friday After Next — playing recently-fired slacker Craig Jones opposite his drug dealer homeboy Smokey (Chris Tucker). In 2019, Cube revealed he wrote Friday 4 in time for the original movie’s 25th anniversary in 2020, only to tweet a year later that Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema “hi-jacked the happiness of the culture” by “[refusing] to make more sequels.”
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On a recent episode of the Drink Champs podcast at LL Cool J’s Rock The Bells festival, Cube revealed why the Friday franchise has been dormant since the release of the short-lived Friday: The Animated Series in 2007.
“I’m trying to get it out of Warner Bros. They don’t believe in the culture, man,” Cube said, explaining that the studio holds distribution rights to the franchise created by Cube and co-writer DJ Pooh.
“Once I take the character’s names, it becomes a property of Friday,” Cube said of a potential name change. “It’s useless. They just need to come off that sh-t!”
Cube wrote two Friday sequel scripts that were “the sh-t,” he said, but both were rejected by Warner Bros. “They were like, ‘Yo, we don’t want Craig and Day Day in jail,’” Cube said of Craig and his cousin Daymond “Day Day” Jones (Mike Epps). “Because Craig and Day Day went to jail for selling weed before it was legal.”
“That sh-t is funny,” he said. “After they rejected it, they had all these movies about going to jail. Orange Is the New Black, Get Hard, so I was like, ‘Man, see, y’all f— me up.’”Cube’s second script was “about the youngsters in the hood having beef with the OGs in the hood, and Craig has to come back and squash that. Because Smokey’s [Tucker’s] son is the new Deebo [Tommy Lister Jr.], and he’s wilding.”
But Warner Bros. “tripped on it,” Cube said. “They f—ed around, and then John Witherspoon [who played Craig’s father, Willie Jones] passed, [Lister Jr.] passed, [Ezal actor A.J. Johnson] passed. There’s a lot of characters who were going to go back to the hood. They just f—ed it up.”
Cube confirmed the fourth movie was going to be called Last Friday, but said Tucker hadn’t committed to reprising his role as stoner Smokey for the first time since the original Friday in 1995.
“Chris is slippy. He’s slippery,” Cube said. “That was a long time ago. I don’t know what the reason is now, but me and Chris is cool. But doing that movie, I don’t know what the deal is.”
