‘Beverly Hills Cop 4’ Is Finally Happening
The last article about Beverly Hills Cop 4 in the ScreenCrush archive is headlined “Beverly Hills Cop 4 Set For Release in March 2016.”
Soooooo... that was a little off.
But now it’s actually happening for real. (For real!) Or so says The Hollywood Reporter, which reports that the film is among a list of titles that will be shot in California as part of a tax-credit program over the next few months. The rights to the sequel were sold by Paramount to Netflix recently; the film will supposedly generate $78 million “in qualified spending in the state ... over the course of 58 filming days.”
If it finally does happen, this will be the first Beverly Hills Cop movie since 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop III, which once starred Eddie Murphy as Detroit cop Axel Foley, but bombed with critics and made only so-so money at the box office. In the interim, Paramount did attempt to make a Beverly Hills Cop television show that would have primarily focused on Axel Foley’s son, played by Brandon T. Jackson, with Murphy only appearing in a cameo role. (According to Murphy, the fact that he showed up in the pilot actually hurt the show’s chances, because he didn’t want to play a regular role in the series, and that was the main part of the pilot that people really liked.
As for Beverly Hills Cop 4, the current filmmakers attached to the project are Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, who previously made Bad Boys For Life — a successful revival of another action comedy from the past. That would seemingly make them very qualified to figure out how to update Axel Foley for the 2020s. We’ll see...