It may be Monday, but there’s some hopeful news for fans of Friday — Ice Cube‘s popular comedy series that put Chris Tucker on the map with the original, as well as Mike Epps in its two sequels. The long-awaited fourth entry in the series, slated to be called Last Friday, was held up for a long time due to Warner Bros.’ control over the rights. Back in 2022, Cube explained, “I don’t know. Warner Bros. is weird right now. I don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know what they’re doing. We’d love to have it back. I think it’s going 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.”
Warner Bros. has gone through some very public changes and Deadline reveals that Cube may finally be closer to getting it made. Cube appeared on Flavor Flav’s SiriusXM show Flavor of the Week when he said,
We’re working on it. We finally got some traction with Warner Bros. They have new leadership, my man Mike DeLuca, who used to be at New Line when I first started, when I first did the first Friday and Players Club and All About the Benjamins. Mike DeLuca was there. So, now he’s running Warner Bros. And him and my man Michael Gruber was like, ‘Yo, what the fuck is going on with Friday? Man, let’s get this shit back online.’”
Cube continued to illustrate his frustration over the studio dragging its feet on the project, “You know, I was a little hot because they had took so long. John Witherspoon passed away, [Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister Jr.] passed away, [Anthony ‘AJ’ Johnson] passed away. I’m like, ‘Man, we keep losing people, and y’all keep dicking around, not doing the movie the way it needed to be done.’” He finally concludes on a pretty solid note, “They wanna do it, but the key is, it’s got to be done right or we shouldn’t fuck with it. So, they finally came to their senses, so hopefully we can get in the process of getting that movie made.”
Cube also revealed back in 2022 that he actually had two follow-up sequels written for the franchise. The first of the two screenplays entered around Cube’s Mike and his sidekick, Mike Epps’ Day-Day going to jail for selling weed. “After they rejected it, they had all these movies about going to jail. So I was like, ‘Man, see, y’all f— me up.’ The other script was about the youngsters in the hood having beef with the OGs, and Craig has to come back and squash that. Smokey’s [Chris Tucker’s] son is the new Deebo [Tommy Lister Jr.], and he’s wilding.”