Breaking the Ice Cube at the Box Office
By Melissa Gentry
HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 4/12/07 — Controversial gangster rapper and actor Ice Cube is anything but cold at the box office with his new hit family film, “Are We Done Yet,” which brought in a successful $22.8 million in its first week and managed to beat out the heavily promoted thriller, “Grindhouse.”
Cube, his preferred nickname, takes on quite a role change, playing the suburban family man trying to do what’s best for his children and reveals the secrets of how gangster rappers really are at heart, “Most gangsters who are considered hard core, when you meet them they’re the coolest dudes. You’re rarely gonna find someone who wants to take over the world and run L.A.” According to Cube most of them are just like everyone else looking for the pursuit of happiness, and simply want the modest luxuries of life: “a car, house, kids, wife, and a picket fence.”
Although the “Done Yet” success helps put Cube on the map as a stand alone box office opener, he knows that it doesn’t change the grind of the film business nor does it make the film process any easier, “It’s not easy to get a movie made no matter what color you are. If you had Steven Spielberg right here, he’d probably tell you the same thing. He still has to go through the ringer to get movies made. That’s the nature of the business. No one is gonna just fly in there with your so-called great ideas and shove money down your throat to make them.”
Even with all this movie success nothing could stop Ice Cube from his passion of making music. Records give him a creative freedom that he doesn’t think he could ever get with movies, “With a record I can just go in there with my producer and do what I want to do. With movies it’s more of a collaboration and it’s a big team. There’s a lot of people working on one project so it’s never really one man, one thought type of deal.” Whether he’ll sell records for the rest of his life, he doesn’t know, “but I don’t think I’ll ever stop making those records.”
As fulfilling as records are to Cube he still thinks that a movie is the “biggest canvas and stage an artist could ever think to want.” Even more than acting Cube loves to produce films because it allows him to create something, “…and be involved in this monster of a creation called a movie. I love ever aspect of it.” Ice Cube’s dream is to someday have a studio of his own and make movies for the reasons of good filmmaking instead of a money decision.
In addition to his music and films, Ice Cube also currently has a reality show in development called, “Good in the Hood” on A&E. The show profiles and showcases people who are doing good things in bad neighborhoods, “We want to talk about the 60% or 70% of teenagers that aren’t going to jail. Even if they do stumble the ones that realize that the dark side is not the way, they want to try and live a more positive life and do better things than they did in the past. Highlighting on what’s good in the hood and not focus on what’s bad all the time.”