There are many reasons why sequels don’t get made until way after the fact, though the main reason is that most stories don’t necessarily warrant a sequel, unless you’re a little yellow minion. But Beverly Hills Cop became an instant hit when it was released in 1984, it only made sense to follow it up with a second one. And then a third one that Eddie Murphy prefers not to think about.
Now, a fourth installment, Beverly Hills: Axel F, is finally premiering nearly 40 years after the original, though Murphy has been planning it for some time, he just needed to wait until it was the right moment. “The reason it took so long for this script to come to for this movie to come together is because we’ve been trying to develop [another] Axel Foley [story] since ’94,” Murphy recently told GameSpot. “But the character wasn’t evolving, and it was just Axel doing stuff.”
Instead of Axel just “doing stuff,” Murphy wanted him to have a more fleshed out story before bringing him back to the big screen. There was an axed TV pilot from 2013 that introduced Axel’s son who becomes a cop, but the show was never picked up.
Finally, after Murphy made Coming 2 America with Netflix, he was ready to take another stab at the character. He explained, “Once we added the whole ‘Axel’s been married, and he’s got a daughter that he’s estranged from and they have a bad relationship,’ that’s what the movie is about, you know?” Murphy said. “On the front, it’s about cops and robbers, but the movie is really about Axel and his daughter reconciling, and once we added that element to it, it just made everything work.”
In Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, Axel returns to work together with his daughter and her ex on a dangerous case. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Taylour Paige, and Kevin Bacon also star. When in doubt, add an estranged daughter for some buddy cop fun!
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is now streaming on Netflix.