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.