Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop IV Just Got A Major Update
After decades of delays and rewrites, Beverly Hills Cop IV has taken a big step forward. But will it be enough to get it in theatres?
Eddie Murphy seems pretty keen to revisit past glories in the last couple of years. Coming 2 America, the long-in-development sequel to his 1988 comedy Coming to America, finally hit theaters (and Amazon Prime Video) in 2021, reportedly being one of the streaming platform’s biggest openers ever. He hosted Saturday Night Live in 2019, not having appeared on the show in any capacity since his departure in 1984. And it even sounded like he was going to appear in the also long-in-development Triplets, the sequel to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito’s comedy Twins (also from 1988). While his part has now been recast with Tracy Morgan, it appears another of Eddie Murphy’s projects is moving forward. Beverly Hills Cop IV has a new director in Mark Molloy, and that is a pretty big piece of the long-awaited puzzle.
Beverly Hills Cop IV is one of Hollywood’s classic development hell stories. The Eddie Murphy franchise has not seen a new installment since 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop III, which both critics and Murphy himself saw as the low point of the series. Plans for a fourth movie were announced soon after the third, but multiple script re-writes, changes of producers (and production companies), and basically everything that can slow down a movie short of a hurricane has happened to Beverly Hills Cop IV. Soon after the release of Coming 2 America, Murphy announced that photography would begin on film; Covid-19 issues shut that down, and the script was again rewritten. Multiple directors have been attached in the past, most notably Brett Ratner (who had previously worked with Eddie Murphy on 2011’s Tower Heist), and the team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. That partnership is currently working on the DCEU HBO film Batgirl, and has apparently been replaced by Mark Molloy.
Mark Molloy is a relative newcomer to Hollywood, and taking on an Eddie Murphy star vehicle is a pretty huge step. Beverly Hills Cop 4 will also be his feature film debut according to IMDb, and getting the keys to an established and highly profitable franchise is a pretty big feather in Molloy’s cap. At the moment, Paramount Pictures has licensed the Beverly Hills Cop franchise to Netflix for distribution (and a potential sequel), so presumably when/if the movie does ever actually get made it will be in the theater/streaming hybrid release that has become common in the days of Covid-19.
Eddie Murphy has been one of the biggest stars in Hollywood for decades and has recently been moving out of his long-stagnant family movie period. The first Beverly Hills Cop movie was the film that elevated him from a popular SNL alumnus to a megastar. Beverly Hills Cop was an enormous box office success, grossing over $230 million dollars, and remains the highest-grossing comedy film of all time. It is also the third highest-grossing R-rated film of all time after The Godfather and The Exorcist. It is not surprising that Eddie Murphy would want to return to this particular property after some time, and hopefully, a new director will manage to kickstart it this time.
