There’s no “Luv” lost between rapper Fat Joe and Warner Bros. Pictures.
The “What’s Luv?” emcee (he also wrote Ashanti’s bridge in the song) told IndieWire he didn’t get “a dollar” for voicing the role of Seymour in 2006 animated movie “Happy Feet.”
“I don’t know what happened with ‘Happy Feet,’” Joe (real name Joseph Antonio Cartagena) said. “I never got a dollar from ‘Happy Feet’…I never caught a dollar, a penny. I mean, it’s a good look, people loved it, but I don’t know what happened with ‘Happy Feet.’”
Bold move to (allegedly) stiff a dude who grew up in Forest Houses (a South Bronx housing project) and literally founded a group called Terror Squad. IndieWire asked a WB rep for their side of the story, but we did not immediately receive a response. It’s probably not easy to track down accounts payable ledgers from 18 years ago.
Anyway, the (alleged) open IOU probably explains why Fat Joe was replaced in “Happy Feet 2” by fellow rapper Common. Joe went on to star in — and presumably get paid for — Spike Lee’s Netflix series “She’s Gotta Have It.” Common’s own IMDb is like a mile long.
Whatever, there are more deals to be made — like the one Joe now has with Starz for his new talk show, “Fat Joe Talks,” which premieres on Friday. The Bronx native’s first guest on the first-ever Starz talk show is Staten Island’s own Method Man (real name Cliff Smith) of the Wu-Tang Clan — and of Starz series “Power Book II: Ghost.”
Fat Joe fans know he’s a storyteller — and not just in music. Cartagena, now 53, is simply a talker, one with a reputation for being way more open and honest than your average rapper. It’s why he’s a great interview — and as Starz hopes, a great interview-er.
Joe credits “getting older and getting comfortable” with his “true self” is what brought him to this place. Mean-mugging is out and smiling for the cameras is in. He took to heart what his buddy Dre (from producer/songwriting duo Cool & Dre) told him years ago: “Everybody likes a funny gangster.”
It’s true, and now Starz has (at least) two of those.
Starz, first launched in 1994 as an HBO-like (HBO-light might be more accurate) movie channel, is now seen by many as Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s playground. (There’s also “Outlander,” but that’s not huge in the hip-hop community, and we have a point here.)
A dozen years ago, it would have been a dangerous place for both rappers to coexist. Fat Joe and 50 Cent had serious, serious beef, which came to a head at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs).
(The short version: 50 Cent and another rapper Ja Rule, a regular collaborator of Fat Joe’s, had serious problems stemming from a member of 50’s crew supposedly robbing Ja Rule. At one point, a member of Ja Rule’s entourage, Black Child, stabbed 50 Cent. 50 and Joe then had a run-in at the VMAs, and yeah, it was a whole thing. Joe has said the bad publicity cost him a $20 million Nike deal.)
Today, it’s a completely different story.
“Me and 50 — we’re family, we’re cool,” Joe said. “If a song comes up where I dissed him or he dissed me, I don’t even like to hear it no more. Once you’re in the chamber of family — I don’t even want to reflect back to that. Starz is definitely the house that 50 built, and so I’m getting my feet wet.”
“He’s happy for me. We talked about it,” he continued. “I always say that 50 should be studied in colleges. He should be studied. This is the guy who came from the block, the bully, the this, the that — now he’s in film…he’s unstoppable.”
Swap Cartagena’s Bronx for Jackson’s Queens, and their evolutions are almost identical.
It took Cartagena a few years longer to get here, but it wasn’t supposed to take this long. In a 2023 Hot 97 radio interview, Joe said he had a major deal lined up for a music-competition show a la “American Idol” (and “The Voice” and all the many failed iterations). The deal would have brought Joe “I-don’t-give-a-fuck” money, he told the radio show. But a day after nearly fainting over the financial details, as Joe has recollected, the lead producer in the deal, Harvey Weinstein, got his comeuppance.
“That deal was worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” Cartagena, who said he was to have partial ownership of the series, told IndieWire.
“Next thing I know, I look at the news — I’m fucked!” he said.
“Fat Joe Talks” premiered at midnight on the Starz app and will first air on the Starz cable channel at 10 p.m. tonight.
