A fourth instalment of the Beverly Hills Cop series has been through many different incarnations through the years, including the attempt to spin it off as a TV series, which faltered at the pilot stage. The latest film was supposed to have been with us this year, but those plans were scrapped last June. But there is more potential progress, as Paramount has hired directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah to make the movie.
According to Deadline, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and star Eddie Murphy loved the directors' film Black, which won the Discovery Award at the Toronto Film Festival last year. They scheduled a meeting with the pair and leaned that Arbi and Fallah worship the original Cop and decided to take a chance on the newcomers.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol writers Andre Nemec and Josh Applebaum have scripted more witticisms and get Axel into trouble while returning him to his Detroit roots. It sounds like it has passed muster with Murphy, who decreed that he wouldn't just return to the franchise for a big payday. "I’m not doing a Beverly Hills Cop unless they have a really incredible script," he told Rolling Stone in January of last year. "They're trying to get it right. I’ve read a couple things that look like they can make some paper, but I’m not doing a shitty movie just to make some paper. The shit got to be right."
The directing duo, who met at film school in Brussels and began making shorts together, got the money together to make Black, in which a 15-year-old girl in a black gang in Brussels must choose between loyalty and love when she falls for a Moroccan boy from a rival gang. Bruckheimer and co. clearly think they could inject some new life into the aging BHC franchise, and are hoping to have the cameras rolling later this year or early next.