Ice Cube has been trying to get a fourth film in his Friday series of comedies made for years. Last Friday is now in the works at Warner Bros, he says.
Rapper, actor and screenwriter Ice Cube has spent years trying to get a fourth film in his Friday series of slacker comedies made, and it’s possible his persistence is finally going to be rewarded. The sequel, possibly called Last Friday, is now in the works at Warner Bros, he says.
Ice Cube had originally talked about getting Last Friday made at production company New Line in 2011 – the studio that backed the first three films in the series – before the project moved over to Warner. A change of management at the latter studio is seemingly behind Last Friday’s sudden movement; Mike De Luca, the producer who was at New Line during the making of Friday, is now the CEO of Warner Bros.
“We finally got some traction with Warner Brothers,” Cube said in an interview with fellow rapper Flava Flav on his Sirius XM radio show (via Complex). “They have new leadership. My man Mike DeLuca, who used to be at New Line [Cinema] 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 Brothers.”
It’s a step forward from 2022, when Ice Cube previously said that Warner Bros had rejected two scripts that he’d written for the sequel. Tempers had become so frayed between the two parties that Ice Cube had even begun demanding that the studio give him the rights back so he could make the film elsewhere.
“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,” Ice Cube said on the Hotboxin’ podcast that December.
The original Friday, co-written by DJ Pooh and co-starring Chris Tucker, was a cult hit in 1995. A response to darker, grittier films about working class life in South Central Los Angeles, its story of two slackers and their debt to a highly intimidating drug dealer became a cult hit. Two sequels followed: Next Friday (2000) and Friday After Next (2002).
Over two decades later, it sounds as though the long talked-about fourth film is at least a step closer to happening. “They want to do it,” he said. “But the key is it gotta be done. So, they finally came to their senses.”
