Last month, Amazon quietly released a new film version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. The movie, in which everything we see is happening on computer screens, stars Ice Cube and was a huge flop with critics. It featured a scene where the world is saved thanks to an Amazon drone driver. Seriously. Now, a month later, the rapper and actor has explained how the internet’s favorite bad movie of 2025 came to be.
During a recent livestream marathon hosted by popular creator Kai Cenat, Ice Cube dropped by to talk about his career, his future projects, and just shoot the shit with Cenat and his friends. At one point during the stream, Cenat asked Ice Cube about Amazon’s War of the Worlds. And while Cenat didn’t call it a terrible movie, it was clear that Ice Cube wasn’t particularly happy about the finished product, which apparently was shot half a decade ago in about two weeks.
“[War of the Worlds is a movie] I did in 2020 during the pandemic, five years ago,” Ice Cube told Cenat during the marathon stream. “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. [It was] pandemic time.”
Ice Cube added that this is the reason War of the Worlds is presented entirely as a series of computer screens. He then added: “But really, if shit went down, everybody would only have their screen to look at.”
As for why the movie took five years to release, Ice Cube provided an odd answer, telling Kai Cenat that after Universal sold the movie to Amazon Prime, it “took a minute to finish” the film because of “how it was shot.”
“The movie is shot, the actors are shot, but all the footage is from real surveillance cameras around the world,” claimed Ice Cube. “And they had to build all that shit. So yeah, it took a minute.”
As someone who has watched the movie and flipped through it a few times, I think a lot of the footage featured in it is actually stock footage or content licensed cheaply from some asset library. But hey, maybe they really did fly around the world collecting original security camera footage for this straight-to-digital low-budget adaptation of a classic novel. That’s possible, too, I guess…?
