Nordling here.
I love Eddie Murphy, and like many of you have been distressed at the path his career has taken. I was hoping that DREAMGIRLS was the start of a new chapter in his acting life, and now with his hosting of the Oscars, and TOWER HEIST, which looks promising to me (yeah, it's a Brett Ratner movie, but baby steps), the inevitable question arises if Murphy would return to BEVERLY HILLS COP, the franchise that made him an international superstar.
Murphy has an upcoming interview with Rolling Stone, which they teased a bit on their site today, and in it, he pretty much puts the quietus on any talk of a movie. But, it seems a television show is a real possibility. Says Murphy, "What I'm trying to do 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 the 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."
That's a wise assessment of the franchise, in my opinion, and I think Murphy is absolutely right in not doing the the same old thing. He seems reinvigorated in the snippets we get of the interview, and he seems interested in returning into more edgier fare, and even returning to stand-up. I hope so; for those of you too young to know, at one point in the 1980s, Eddie Murphy owned the planet, and although those days are gone, I, like many of his fans, would love to see that old Eddie Murphy rock our world again.
Nordling, out.
