New Directors Onboard for Long-Awaited Fourth Installment of Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop

Though the long-awaited (22 years now) sequel to Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop comedy trilogy won’t come to fruition this year, it seems that the project is not dead yet, as many recent headlines have suggested.

On the contrary, there’s exciting news for fans of the first three Beverly Hills Cop films who’ve been waiting patiently for more than two decades for a fourth. Despite the film being pushed back into 2017, Paramount Pictures has reportedly hired two directors, hailing from Belgium, to helm it: Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. The directing duo, who are big fans of the original franchise, have already made waves in the film community, snagging the Discovery Award for the gritty street drama Black at the Toronto Film Festival in 2015.

Murphy, the star of the series as the titular Beverly Hills cop, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (of Flashdance, Top Gun, Black Hawk Down and many more) have been working on the project for a while now, and gave the film an optimistic, but ultimately unrealistic release date for later this year. The film has gone through a series of ups and downs during pre-production, getting pulled from Paramount’s 2016 schedule for issues with the script.

“They’re still trying to get that script right,” Murphy said at the time of the announcement. “I’m not doing [another] Beverly Hills Cop unless they have a really incredible script.”

The news that the fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie is now in the very capable hands of El Arbi and Fallah means that Brett Ratner, who was originally slated to direct the film, has been removed from the project. Ratner and Murphy have worked together in the past on 2011’s Tower Heist, and Ratner is comfortable with action-comedy as a genre, as proven through his directing of the beloved franchise Rush Hour. However, these shifts in authority, as well as Murphy’s fastidious demands on the script, could signal that Beverly Hills Cop 4 is headed in a new, exciting and modern direction.