Ice Cube believes that the first Friday film was the most “impactful” out of the trilogy thanks to its message surrounding gun violence.
Cube and his Mount Westmore colleagues E-40 and Too $hort stopped by LL COOL J’sRock The Bells Radio show, where they touched on the Death Certificate MC’s iconic movie franchise.
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During their lengthy discussion, LL asked Cube about the seminal moment in the first Friday film between Cube and the late John Witherspoon, who advises Cube’s character, Craig, to put down his gun and use his fists instead.
“You win some, you lose some, but you live. You live to fight another day,” Witherspoon’s Pops character tells his on-stage son in the scene.
Ice Cube said that scene alone made the first Friday film stand out from its subsequent sequels.
“It was an important scene and that’s why the first Friday is so impactful over the other ones,” Cube said at the 47-minute mark. “Because if you look at the other ones, they don’t have that moment in the movie.
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“So it took a comedy and it took the laughter, and it was a teachable moment. It was dramatic in a movie that was so funny. It was impactful because what he was saying was some real shit.”
He continued: “It’s cool because it was like, ‘Yo, I would have never moved in this neighborhood if you needed a goddamn gun to walk down the street.’ That’s impactful. Before Friday, shit was so crazy in the hood when I had it written that [Witherspoon] was like, ‘You going down the street? Take this [gun] with you.'”
The first Friday film dropped to commercial acclaim in 1995, and Ice Cube followed it up with Next Friday and Friday After Next in 2000 and 2002, respectively. Both sequels enjoyed commercial success, but failed to achieve the same level of acclaim as the original.
A fourth entry in the franchise — tentatively titled Last Friday — has been rumored for a while now, but Cube has blamed the delay on Warner Bros., who have the distribution rights for any future installments.
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“I’m trying to get it out of Warner Brothers. they don’t believe in the culture, man,” he said during a live taping of Drink Champs at LL COOL J’s Rock The Bells festival this past summer. “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 added: “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 wilin’!
“They tripped on it, man. They fucked around and then John Witherspoon passed. Then Deebo passed … they just fucked it up.”
There may yet be hope for a fourth Friday film, though, as Ice Cube recently revealed he’s currently trying to regain ownership of the movie series from Warner Bros.
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“We’d love to have it back. I think it’s gon’ be close to a time when we get it back,” he said on Mike Tyson’s Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson podcast earlier this month. “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.”
He added: “They need to give it to me, and they gon’ make money … 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.”
