Ice Cube.
Photo: Stuart C. Wilson/2014 Getty Images
Deadline reports that Universal Pictures has snatched up a Christmastime, Ice Cube-starring script about a modern-day Scrooge. Titled Humbug, the film will reimagine Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol with Ice as a wealthy, unpleasant real-estate mogul haunted by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future (no word yet on if this mogul will also be a Republican who eventually runs for president and threatens to build huge walls everywhere, but it will be a cautionary tale nonetheless). The script was reportedly written by Todd R. Jones and Earl Richey Jones; Tim Story, who has worked with Ice on Barbershop and the Ride Along series, is set to direct for a potential 2017 release — in other words: not soon enough.