Paramount has set Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah to direct its long-awaited fourth installment of the Beverly Hills Cop series. The Belgian writer-directors are best known for their edgy drama Black, which won the Discovery Award at the Toronto Film Festival last year. The studio, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Eddie Murphy have been working diligently to get the script and elements right for a film that had been once been slated to be released this year. They loved Black, and when they met with the filmmakers, they were charmed to discover how important the original Beverly Hills Cop was to them. Even though this is a major step up from the budget of their last film, this became an opportunity to reframe a venerable franchise with youthful energy. They will direct a script by writers Josh Appelbaum & Andre Nemec that will bring Murphy’s street smart cop character Axel Foley back to his Detroit origins. It is gritty with the trademark irreverent humor that powered the first three films to north of $735 million in global box office.
The directing duo made a splash in Toronto with Black, a Romeo & Juliet story about a 15-year-old girl in a black gang in Brussels who must choose between loyalty and love when she falls for a Moroccan boy from a rival gang. El Arbi is a Brussels-based filmmaker of Moroccan heritage who studied at the Luca School of Arts in Brussels and directed the short film Broeders and the feature Image both with Fallah. He is also of Moroccan heritage and also studied at the Luca School of Arts in Brussels. Broeders won the best Flemish student short film at the Ghent International Film Festival and the audience award at the Leuven International Film Festival.
The hope is to get the film in production late this year or early 2017. Murphy next stars in the Bruce Beresford-directed Mr. Church, with Britt Robertson. Mark Canton and Courtney Solomon produced and the pic will be released in September by Cinelou.
The filmmakers are repped by CAA, Management 360 and Belgian agent Ken Lambrechts.
