Another film in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise is likely coming to Netflix. The streaming service bought the rights to a sequel from Paramount Pictures in a one-time licensing deal, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The movie would be the fourth in the series, with the last one having been released 25 years ago.
Eddie Murphy will reportedly star in the movie, reprising his role as Detroit police officer Alex Foley. Jerry Bruckheimer, who produced the first two Beverly Hills Cop films, will also be returning for the project. The rest of the potential cast and the film’s director have not yet been released.
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Paramount has been eager to sell the rights to its franchises to Netflix because it does not have a streaming service of its own. Meanwhile, WarnerBros. and Disney have been keeping the rights to their projects in hopes of rebooting them for their own streamers.
The road to creating a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie has been a long one. It was first announced for a mid-1990s release, but that died out. It was briefly resurrected in 2006 when Bruckheimer agreed to return to the franchise in an attempt to create a sequel that had the feel of the original movie, but that too didn’t work out.
In 2011, Murphy said that the fourth film was not going to happen, and discussed intentions to create a television show instead. “They’re not doing it. What I’m trying to do now is produce a TV show starring Axel Foley’s son, and Axel is the chief of police now in Detroit,” Murphy told E! News at the time. “I’d do the pilot, show up here and there. None of the movie scripts were right; it was trying to force the premise. If you have to force something, you shouldn’t be doing it. It was always a rehash of the old thing. It was always wrong.”
In 2014, Paramount announced plans to shoot the fourth Beverly Hills Cop in Detroit for a 2016 release. Murphy was eager to reprise his role, telling Rolling Stone, “I haven’t done a street guy, working class, blue-collar character in ages so maybe it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t remember he was able to do that.’”
In 2015, Paramount pulled the movie from its 2016 release schedule over script concerns. The film has been dead since then, but now it seems Netflix is once again breathing life into the sequel.
Murphy is currently working on Coming 2 America, another much-anticipated ’90s movie sequel.
