'Beverly Hills Cop 4' Release Date Scrubbed By Paramount

Last summer, Paramount announced Beverly Hills Cop 4 alongside Transformers 5, G.I. Joe 3, and Hansel and Gretel 2. Brett Ratner was to direct, with Eddie Murphy returning to star as Axel Foley in a story that takes him back to Detroit.

The film was even given a release date, March 25, 2016, but we've heard very little about the film since then. No story, no casting, no shoot date. Now Paramount has scrubbed the Beverly Hills Cop 4 release date from the calendar, leaving the film in a sort of limbo. Just try not to cry all over your screen, OK? Salty tears leave awful smudges.

Variety says that Beverly Hills Cop 4 has no new release date, and that an unnamed Bad Robot film has been set for March 11 instead.

(In fact, that Bad Robot movie is not quite unnamed, nor is it entirely mysterious — it is the film currently going by the name Valencia. That name will change for release.)

This isn't much of a surprise; this past January Eddie Murphy cast serious doubt on the enterprise, saying,

They still trying to get that script right. I'm not doing a Beverly Hills Cop unless they have a really incredible script. 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.

That script was reportedly by Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), though we don't know if the most recent drafts are from them.

Beverly Hills Cop 4 has been talked about for a long time, and for a while it looked like the old film franchise would be redone as a TV series oriented around Axel Foley's son, with Eddie Murphy also appearing. All those previous efforts amounted to naught, however, and perhaps this one will, too. No one is crying for a new Beverly Hills Cop movie. If, as Murphy says, that shit is right, we'll see it. But there's no reason to rush a movie out just to do it, and every reason not to.