At the end of July, the Ice Cube-led War of the Worlds was released to Amazon Prime Video subscription holders, and… well let’s just say that Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise’s 2005 adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel doesn’t need to worry about competition. This 2025 movie release was critically slammed and even had a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes for a time. Now Ice Cube has explained that the reason that this version of War of the Worlds turned out the way it did came out of necessity.
This new War of the Worlds took a screenlife approach with its source material by having Ice Cube’s Will Radford, a Department of Homeland Security officer, dealing with the alien invasion from behind a computer screen. As the actor explained while appearing on Kai Cenat Live, that’s because War of the Worlds was shot at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. He explained:
[‘War of the Worlds’] was a movie I did in 2020 during the pandemic. We shot it in 15 days, and it was during the pandemic. So the director wasn’t in there. None of the actors was in there. This was the only way we could really shoot the movie.
War of the Worlds specifically started rolling cameras in September 2020, when social distancing was the norm and strict health and safety guidelines being set in place for any film or TV production that happened to be going. So that explains why Will Radford was in a room by himself and only interacting with the other characters over phone and video chat. However, at that time, the public didn’t know the title of this Ice Cube movie, and it wasn’t revealed to be a War of the Worlds adaptation until last October.
You may be asking yourself now, then why did it take five years for this movie to come out? According to Ice Cube, that was due to a combination of it changing studios and putting together the story’s surveillance footage. He said:
Well, it was a Universal movie, and they sold it to Amazon Prime. And it took a minute because… the movie is shot, the actors are shot, but all the footage is from real surveillance cameras all around the world. So they had to build all that shit [and then collect and edit the footage].
Alas, the end result did not impress critics and general audiences, though at least the movie managed to achieve viral fame, particular for its on-the-nose Amazon product placement. Ice Cube was joined in War of the Worlds by Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, Iman Benson, Henry Hunter Hall, Devon Bostick, Michael O’Neill, Andrea Savage and Jim Meskimen. Rich Lee directed the movie, and Kenneth A. Golde and March Hyman wrote the script.
Feel free to judge War of the Worlds for yourself over on Amazon Prime Video. Otherwise, you’re welcome to use your Apple TV+ subscription to stream his guest appearance in the eighth episode of The Studio, which won four Emmys last night.
