Eddie Murphy Is Dropping Quips and Emptying Gun Clips in ‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’ Teaser

Cue the synths: After almost 30 years, Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley will return to the beat with Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F set to hit Netflix next summer. 

The long-awaited fourth installment of the hit cop-comedy franchise got its first teaser today. It doesn’t give anything away in terms of plot, but there are shootouts, car chases, wanton destruction, and bits like a Beverly Hills mother making her child take influencer pics and Murphy joking about getting arrested not once, but twice. 

As for the actual story, it centers around Axel and his daughter, Jane, played by Taylour Paige. After Jane’s life is threatened, a synopsis reads, she and Axel set out to uncover a dangerous conspiracy, linking up with some old friend, Billy Rosewood (played by Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton), as well as new partner Bobby Abbott, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. 

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, which was directed by Mark Molloy, will finally arrive after years of false starts. A fourth movie was first announced in the Nineties but never materialized; in the mid-2010s, a movie was primed to shoot in Michigan but never got off the ground. At one point, it was even supposed to be a TV show, with Murphy telling Rolling Stone in 2011, “What I’m trying to do with Beverly Hills Cop now is produce a TV show starring Axel Foley’s son, and Axel is the chief of police now in Detroit. I’d do the pilot, show up here and there. None of the movie scripts were right; it was trying to force this premise. If you have to force something, you shouldn’t be doing it. It was always a rehash of the old thing. It was always wrong.”

The last Beverly Hills Cop movie was 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop III, directed by John Landis. The hit series debuted in 1984 with Martin Brest’s Beverly Hills cop, and received a sequel, directed by Tony Scott, in 1987. 

After only taking scattered roles during the 2010s, Murphy has kept himself comparatively busy in the 2020s so far. In 2021, he dropped the long-awaited Coming to America sequel, while this year he starred in Kenya Barris’ romantic comedy, You People, as well as the Christmas comedy, Candy Cane Lane. Earlier this year it was also reported that he was close to starring as Inspector Clouseau in a new Pink Panther reboot.