The first two Beverly Hills Cops movies are beloved by fans of the franchise. The third movie, 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop 3, has a different reputation among viewers. The third Axel Foley adventure was a massive critical bomb and made less than half of the second film’s box-office tally. Now, 30 years later, Eddie Murphy is back as Foley in Netflix’s Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. And there’s a good reason why we’re only getting the fourth movie after such a long break.
“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,” Eddie Murphy told GameSpot. “But the character wasn’t evolving, and it was just Axel doing stuff.”
While many of us would certainly love to watch Axel Foley “do stuff,” a lack of any kind of growth would be unsatisfying. That’s something Tom Cruise managed to figure out before releasing Top Gun: Maverick in 2022. Instead of a mere nostalgia play, Maverick explored how Cruise’s character had grown and evolved in the decades after we last saw him in action. The new Beverly Hills Cop does the same for Axel Foley.
In Axel F, we learn that Foley is still on the job in his hometown of Detroit, but a lot has happened in his life. For instance, Axel has an adult daughter he’s estranged from. Where does she work? Beverly Hills, of course.
“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.”
Of course, just because Axel’s changed doesn’t mean the people who have been in his life for all these years have. The new film sees not just the return of Murphy to the role he made famous, but also his co-stars from the franchise, Judge Reinhold (Billy Rosewood), John Ashton (John Taggart), Paul Reiser (Jeffrey Friedman), and Bronson Pinchot (Serge). They’ve all grown in the years since we last saw them and thankfully none of them overstay their welcome in a story primarily focused around Axel and his daughter. And, naturally, Axel is as out of touch in Beverly Hills as he was in the ’80s and the ’90s.
But, of course, it’s also a different world–in front of and behind the camera. The previous three Beverly Hills Cop movies were all theatrical releases by Paramount Pictures. Naturally, many assumed that is where a fourth movie would land. Instead, Axel F is a Netflix exclusive. The reasoning behind that, per franchise producer Jerry Bruckheimer, is simple.
“They wanted to do it. We couldn’t get Paramount to do it,” he explained. “But [Netflix] wanted to do it; previous [Paramount] management sold it to Netflix. And we thank them for that.”
As for what comes next, it all depends on whether Netflix’s audiences finds and watches Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. If it becomes a hit, Bruckheimer teases that a fifth movie is definitely possible.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is streaming on Netflix now.
