Whereas the final film Eddie Murphy made for a streaming service was a sanity-taxing Christmas-themed fever dream, a few of us are nonetheless cautiously optimistic that Netflix’s upcoming Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F — the fourth movie within the Beverly Hills Cop saga — shall be good.
On the very least, it must be higher than the final entry within the franchise; Beverly Hills Cop III, the famously disappointing threequel that discovered Axel Foley busting a counterfeiting ring in an amusement park that positively wasn’t Disneyland, or some other legally-actionable real-life location. And in relation to cinematic spectacle, issues don’t get way more thrilling than Eddie Murphy slicing a line and mildly inconveniencing George Lucas.
However this wasn’t all the time the plan for Beverly Hills Cop III. Quite a few completely different concepts have been floated for the film Murphy as soon as stated there was “no motive to do.” One was a pitch from Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne “by which Axel Foley has to take care of his celeb cop standing.” Whereas producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer of Prime Gun and cocaine fame have been proud of the concept, the take care of the studio fell by and the undertaking collapsed (the producers nonetheless obtained to stroll away with “a million-dollar payout”).
Then, the pinnacle of Paramount on the time, Brandon Tartikoff, got here up with a novel proposal: The third Beverly Hills Cop and the third Crocodile Dundee movie could possibly be the identical film. Yeah, Axel Foley would crossover with Dundee, performed by Paul Hogan. Whereas that concept finally didn’t pan out, Crocodile Dundee did ultimately make his approach to Los Angeles in a film, and it was a complete catastrophe.
A extra promising suggestion was for Alex Foley to journey to England and accomplice with a Scotland Yard detective, which might retain the “fish out of water” framework that made the unique so well-liked. At one level the brand new English character was going to be performed by Sean Connery. One other plan, it appears, was to have Murphy “teaming up with John Cleese to take down the Kray brothers” — or a minimum of gangster characters impressed by the Kray Brothers.
Come to think about it, Cleese did know a factor or two about getting laughs with fictional characters primarily based on Reginald and Ronald Kray.
The specifics of those numerous pitches are all fairly murky, however seemingly the U.Okay.-based story concepts fell by the wayside when Die Onerous screenwriter Steven De Souza was employed, and shifted the motion to a California theme park. Whereas it could have been thrilling to see a younger Murphy share the display screen with a post-Fawlty Towers, pre-hacky senior citizen Cleese, the pair did work collectively ultimately: Each actors lent their voices to a number of Shrek films and Cleese performed the holographic chauffeur in The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
On second thought, possibly Murphy and Cleese ought to simply keep the hell away from one another.
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