F. Gary Gray's 'Friday' opens — Ice Cube and Chris Tucker comedy hit

Why it matters

Friday opened April 26, 1995. F. Gary Gray directed his first feature. Ice Cube wrote it with DJ Pooh. The film stars Cube as Craig, a recently fired young man who spends a single day on his porch with his best friend Smokey (Chris Tucker), being broke and dealing with the neighborhood (Bernie Mac as the pastor, John Witherspoon as the dad, Tiny Lister Jr. as Deebo). The budget was $3.5 million. The film grossed almost $28 million. What Friday did, beyond launching a franchise that ran into the 2000s (Next Friday, Friday After Next), is reset Ice Cube's public persona at exactly the moment the NWA-era pariah framing was running out of gas. The Cube who wrote AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted in 1990 was a different commercial product than the Cube who could open and carry a stoner comedy in 1995. The two are the same person; he just expanded the range of what he could sell. Friday is the move that opened the next twenty years of his career as a producer and family-comedy lead (the Are We There Yet movies, the Barbershop franchise, Ride Along). You probably know somebody who can quote the entire movie from memory. Most Black-American households of a certain generation have one.