Beverly Hills Cop Collection

This franchise started as a serious action vehicle, and it took three different leading men before it became the comedy anyone remembers. Producer Don Simpson had the basic fish-out-of-place-cop idea back in 1977, and after his and Jerry Bruckheimer's success with Flashdance in 1983, writer Daniel Petrie Jr. was brought in to give the project a more humorous angle, with the lead renamed Axel Foley along the way. The role went first to Mickey Rourke, who actually signed a holding deal to play him, before Sylvester Stallone entered the picture and gave the script his own dramatic rewrite — reportedly unable to picture himself "comically terrorizing Beverly Hills," he turned the finale into Foley stealing a Lamborghini and playing chicken with a freight train. Petrie has said the budget that would have required was more than Paramount wanted to spend, and Stallone left the project days later, recycling much of what he'd written into 1986's Cobra instead. Beverly Hills Cop II quietly winks at that history: a Cobra movie poster is visible in the background in one scene.

Eddie Murphy came in on short notice, and what's notable is how little the script itself actually changed for him — by Petrie's account, Murphy's only real request was that the character be his own age. The comedy came from performance, not rewrites: Murphy, along with co-stars John Ashton and Judge Reinhold, improvised most of their comic dialogue on set, turning a script that had just been a serious action vehicle for two other actors into something built entirely around Murphy's specific, off-the-cuff timing. He was paid $4 million for the role, part of a five-picture Paramount deal that followed his breakout in Trading Places the year before — meaning the studio was already betting heavily on him before this film even proved it out.

The gap between entries tells its own story about how differently this franchise has been handled compared to most of what's in this library: eighteen years between Part III and Axel F, forty years total between the original and Murphy's return to the role, released well outside the usual theatrical cycle the earlier films came from.