After 17 years away from our screens, the return of Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett turned out to be well worth the wait, after the third installment in the Bad Boys franchise scored the biggest box office and best reviews of the trilogy, and it wasn’t even close.
A $426 million haul and a 76% Rotten Tomatoes score was an impressive return for an R-rated action sequel that had suffered countless false starts during the lengthy development process, and nobody was surprised in the slightest when a fourth buddy cop adventure was officially announced on the very same day Bad Boys for Life was released.
However, the controversy that continues to swirl around Will Smith in the aftermath of the Academy Awards may have thrown a spanner in the works, at least according to The Hollywood Reporter. Plenty of questions are being asked about the Oscar-winner’s upcoming slate, and it sounds as though Bad Boys 4 could be a short-term casualty, as you can read below.
“Is there any immediate effect on his projects? Well, here’s one tidbit we’ve heard this week: Bad Boys 4 had been in active development, and Smith received 40 pages of the script before the Oscars incident, according to our sources. Now there will be a … pause … in work as things play out, we’ve been told.”
That’s opacity of the report doesn’t offer much in the way of concrete specifics, but it would arguably the safest and smartest move on Smith’s part to return to a guaranteed money-spinning blockbuster as his next port of call after the already-infamous incident, so we’ll be very curious to see how Bad Boys 4 progresses from here on out.