Currently riding high on the success of Ride Along, the Jump Street films and Straight Outta Compton, Ice Cube is about to have a very happy Christmas. He's reportedly negotiated an eight-figure fee to star in **Humbug, a Scrooge-riffing comedy to be directed by his Ride Along and Barbershop honcho Tim Story.
Obviously taking Charles Dickens' perennial A Christmas Carol as its inspiration, Humbug will see Cube playing an ultra-capitalist real-estate mogul shown the error of his greedy ways when visited by a succession of didactic ghosts on Christmas Eve. "Any motherfucker who go around saying 'Merry Christmas' deserve a cap in they ass," he probably won't say.
MGM, New Line and Disney all wanted the project, but Universal won the bidding war. Todd R. Jones and R. Richey Jones (Johnson Family Vacation, Rio) wrote the screenplay that caused all the buzz. Whether we're talking about an R-rated comedy or a more family-friendly affair (like Cube's Are We There Yet? and its sequel) remains to be seen.
Cube is currently shooting Barbershop 3, and we'll next see him in Ride Along 2 (directed once again by Story), which is out on January 22. Humbug is expected for Christmas 2017, but that's not yet set in stone.