While Sherlock Holmes keeps solving cases even at 93, Detroit’s second most popular cop after RoboCop, Axel Foley, seems to be in early retirement already. Paramount Pictures has taken Beverly Hills Cop IV off it’s release schedule. As Warner Bros had planned Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice for that very weekend, the movie had to leave anyway. But they didn’t just move it to another weekend – it’s gone.
In January, Eddie Murphy swore to only agree to a new movie if the script would turn out to be worthy enough. Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec who wrote the super successful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remake were last seen working on a script for this. Brett Ratner is set to helm, but at the moment the man is off preparing the Rush Hour TV series.
I remember reading one of the proposed scripts a few years ago and it was actually a solid work. It had lots of action, a very modern tone to it, and it did a great job with an almost sixty year old Foley. It was nowhere as bad as A Good Day to Die Hard. What I heard last through the grapevine is that Murphy tries hard to make this a gritty action thriller in the vein of the Bourne movies, while the producers of course want his Foley to be a fun motor mouth. That’s why they’ll probably never agree on a script.
So why not just do the remake already, you might ask? Well, they already did that. In 2013, Barry Sonnenfeld apparently shot a Shawn Ryan produced pilot for a proposed TV series that would have starred Brandon T. Jackson as Foley’s son. CBS passed on it, with Murphy later claiming that plans for the series died down when he declined to have a recurring role. He said he wouldn’t do “Beverly Hills Cop on TV”. It seems he won’t do it at all.
Is it too late for a Billy Rosewood spin-off? You know Judge Reinhold would be game.
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