A leadership shakeup at Warner Bros. Entertainment may clear a path for Ice Cube to finally give fans the long-awaited sequel to Friday After Next. The entertainer has spoken with candor about the uphill battle to get the green light for the film from studio executives for years. But now, things could be changing for the better.
According to Baller Alert, he said, “We finally got some traction with Warner Bros. They have new leadership. My man Mike De Luca, 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 De Luca was there, so now he’s running Warner Bros.,” when he appeared on Flavor Flav’s weekly radio show, “Flavor of the Week,” on June 17.
As previously reported, Cube has been working behind the scenes to bring Last Friday to fruition. He hoped the fourth installment of the franchise would be ready for release to mark the 25th anniversary of the original film’s release in April 2020. He told ESPN’s “The Jump” in 2019, “We are pushing for it, we finished the script, we are getting notes from the studio and it’s going back and forth,” but the film’s future has been hanging in the balance ever since.
The West Coast rap legend spoke about the obstacles he has endured while trying to gain ownership of the project. He told boxing great Mike Tyson that Last Friday went through two script rewrites before being buried under notes from the studio.
“I don’t know what they’re doing; they don’t know what they’re doing. We’d love to have it back,” Cube said during his appearance on the “Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson” podcast. “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,” he explained.
Cube would go on to reveal that a sequel to All About the Benjamins was caught in the same development purgatory. That same year, De Luca reached a deal to join Warner Bros. Entertainment’s executive team, overseeing film management, which includes New Line Cinema, the studio that released the 1995 classic. The media entity was incorporated into Warner in 2008.
Friday helped launch the film careers of Chris Tucker and Mike Epps. The Rush Hour star has shared that he would consider returning to the franchise, even hinting at DC Young Fly playing his son, if he is presented with the right script. According to Box Office Mojo, the three films have amassed $118,049,776, with each installment outperforming the last.