After seventeen years away from our screens, Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett made their long-awaited return in Bad Boys For Life, which scored widespread critical acclaim and still remains the highest-grossing movie of 2020 after raking in almost $420 million at the box office before the Coronavirus pandemic sent the industry into the shutdown from which it still hasn’t emerged.
Not content with bringing back one dormant action franchise, directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah have set their sights on a series that’s been in hibernation for even longer, with the duo being the latest names tasked with steering Beverly Hills Cop 4 out of development hell. We haven’t seen Eddie Murphy’s Alex Foley since the third installment was released in 1994, but after countless false starts, it seems to be picking up some serious momentum, with Netflix footing the bill and Mission: Impossible writers Andre Nemec and Josh Applebaum tasked with the latest draft of the script.
El Arbi and Fallah showed with Bad Boys For Life that they were more than capable of leaning into the history and nostalgia that comes with creating a new entry in a long-running franchise, while still managing to put a fresh spin on the material to appeal to the audiences that weren’t even alive when the first movie came out, and hopefully they can apply the same winning formula to Beverly Hills Cop 4.
When asked in a recent interview what characters they wanted to see the Bad Boys cross paths with in the future, they were quick to name Axel Foley as their preferred candidate, and also hinted at the prospect of the Jerry Bruckheimer Cinematic Universe.
“Axel Foley, we thought about that already. Because it would be so cool, if there’s like really Beverly Hills Cop and Bad Boys together in the same universe, because it’s the Jerry Bruckheimer universe.”
That sounds like a pretty wild idea, but one that would no doubt generate plenty of excitement among fans of the action genre, even if it was just a brief throwaway cameo. If that’s the route they want to go down, then maybe they should also throw in Top Gun’s Maverick, Con Air’s Cameron Poe and Pirates of the Caribbean’s Jack Sparrow as the rest of the Bruckheimer-verse’s Avengers for good measure with The Rock’s John Mason as their Nick Fury, and they’d have a guaranteed billion dollar hit on their hands.
