While plans to release Beverly Hills Cop 4 just a few years after Beverly Hills Cop III obviously never came to fruition, the prospect of having Eddie Murphy reprise Axel Foley has never entirely gone away. In fact, the project has had new life breathed into it over the last several years, with Murphy saying in March 2021 that he wouldn’t move forward with Beverly Hills Cop 4 until “the script is right.” After a long stretch without any major updates on the upcoming movie, today brings word that Beverly Hills Cop 4 has gone through a major behind-the-scenes shakeup, as there’s a new director leading the charge.
Back in 2016, directing duo Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah were tapped to helm Beverly Hills Cop 4, and since that time they’ve gone on to direct Bad Boys for Life and the upcoming HBO Max movie Batgirl, which stars In the Heights’ Leslie Grace as Barbara Gordon. As it turns out, Arbi and Fallah deciding to work on Batgirl led to them exiting Beverly Hills Cop 4, and Deadline reports that Mark Molloy has now been handed the directorial reins. The project is also still listed as being in development, with no production start date being jotted into the calendar.
Beverly Hills Cop 4 will serve as Mark Molloy’s feature directorial debut, but you may be familiar with his work on commercials, most notably the Apple at Work - The Underdogs video short. Back in 2019, Paramount Pictures licensed Netflix to distribute Beverly Hills Cop 4, and evidently the platform’s bigwigs are confident that Molloy is the right person to finally take the long-awaited sequel to the next stage.
The original Beverly Hills Cop introduced Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley to the world, with the Detroit police detective heading to the title California location to investigate the murder of his best friend. The supporting cast included Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Lisa Eilbacher and Steven Berkoff, and along with the 1984 movie being met with a lot of positive reviews, it made $316 million worldwide. Beverly Hills Cop II and Beverly Hills Cop III followed in 1987 and 1994, respectively, but neither sequel came close to reaching the first entry’s critical and commercial heights. Since Beverly Hills Cop 4 will be available with a Netflix subscription, it won’t have to worry about making splash on the big screen outside of a possible limited theatrical run, but Murphy has still been careful with making sure the project is the best it can be before cameras start rolling.
No plot details for Beverly Hills Cop 4 have been shared with the public, though in 2017, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah were still attached to it, they expressed interest in having either Channing Tatum or Tom Hardy play the movie’s main villain. I’m suspicious about if such castings could still happen, but a little extra star power alongside Eddie Murphy certainly couldn’t hurt. Beverly Hills Cop 4 will mark Murphy’s second time reprising a movie character he’d first played decades earlier, having already reprised Akeem Joffer in Coming 2 America, which a lot of people watched during its first weekend on Amazon.
Hopefully now that Mark Molloy is aboard Beverly Hills Cop 4, it can finally make more meaningful progress forward, leading to casting announcements, a launch date for principal photography and more. For now, you can look through the 2022 Netflix movie schedule to learn what the streaming service will deliver later this year.
