Ice Cube has been battling with Warner Bros over the Friday franchise for years. In a new interview with Mike Tyson on the former heavyweight champion’s Hotboxin’ podcast, the legendary rapper and Big 3 founder said that Warner Bros needs to give him back the franchise he started. He has blamed the studio for waiting too long to greenlight a final installment in the franchise, with both John Witherspoon and Tommy Lister Jr. passing in the time since the franchise’s last installment.
“I don’t know. Warner Brothers is weird right now,” Cube said. “I don’t know what they doing, they don’t know what they doing. We’d love to have it back. I think it’s gon’ 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.”
Tyson then asked Cube if he’s ever thought about purchasing the franchise from the studio, to which Cube replied, “Fuck no.”
“I ain’t putting shit up for it. Fuck no,” Cube 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.”
Cube added that the final installment in the franchise is in development hell and has written two screenplays for the movie, with neither one being greenlit.
“It was in development hell,” he said about the last script. “They just kept giving you note after note after note, never giving you the green light.”
You can check out the interview below.
