The Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F Trailer Attempts To Save The Legacy Of A Once-Great Action Franchise

"The Godfather Part III," "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," "Jaws 3-D," "Superman III" ... there are tons of examples of film trilogies that feature a dramatic drop in quality in their third entries. "Beverly Hills Cop III" definitely belongs on that list; the 1994 stinker, directed by John Landis, plopped Eddie Murphy's beloved fish-out-of-water Detroit cop character Axel Foley back in Beverly Hills, but this time, it takes place largely in a ... theme park. (Somehow, the movie is even worse than that description suggests.) Thanks to scripting issues and scheduling problems, the film also broke up the beloved trio of Murphy, John Ashton, and Judge Reinhold, the latter of whom play Taggart and Rosewood, the Beverly Hills police officers who go from being Axel's pesky babysitters in the first movie to lifelong pals and de facto partners in the second. Ashton dodged a bullet by not appearing in the third film at all, and that movie's lousy script didn't do the returning Murphy or Reinhold any favors.

Now, 30 years later, the trio is back together again for "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F," the long-awaited (?) fourth entry in this franchise, and this time, the film is being made directly for Netflix. The first two movies — directed by Martin Brest and Tony Scott, respectively — are both classics of the action genre, and even Murphy himself has admitted that the third film is "a crock of s***." Can director Mark Molloy, a commercial director making his feature directorial debut here, be the person to right the ship and reclaim the legacy of this once-great franchise? Time will tell, but a new "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F" trailer is here to potentially help answer that question. Check it out above.

We started writing about a potential "Beverly Hills Cop 4" at /Film back in 2007, but Murphy actually wanted to get rolling on a sequel as early as the mid-1990s before the project went dormant for a decade. Since then, it's gone through multiple producers (Jerry Bruckheimer to Lorenzo di Bonaventura, back to Bruckheimer again) and directors (Brett Ratner, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, and eventually Molloy), and was even envisioned as a TV series for CBS in 2013 that was going to be centered on Axel Foley's son. Murphy filmed that pilot, but the network passed on it, and instead of taking that as a sign that maybe this franchise should be left alone, the interested parties revamped their efforts of making another movie — and here we are.

It will be fascinating to see if this long, winding road through development ends up being worthwhile. Will "Axel F" be a surprisingly fun return to this world? Or will seeing these characters three or four decades beyond their prime be yet another depressing reminder that intellectual property rules all in modern Hollywood and that age comes for us all? Find out when "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F" arrives on Netflix July 3, 2024.