Beverly Hills Cop (found unaired CBS pilot based on Eddie Murphy action comedy film; 2013)
The first film's poster
Status: Found
Date found: 17 Dec 2022
Found by: tygerbug
Beverly Hills Cop was an action comedy film that was directed by Martin Brest and released on December 5, 1984. The movie follows Detroit police officer Axel Foley (played by Eddie Murphy), who visits Beverly Hills, California to solve the murder of his best friend Michael "Mikey" Tandino (played by James Russo), while also being followed by Sergeant John Taggart (played by John Ashton) and Detective William "Billy" Rosewood (played by Judge Reinhold). The film was a huge success upon its release and became one of Eddie Murphy's most iconic roles. Its success led to the production of two sequels in 1987 and 1994 that didn't reach the same acclaim and success as the first film. A fourth film has been in development since the mid-1990s and only started filming in August 2022[1], but while the fourth film titled Beverly Hills Cop: Axel Foley was still in development, there were plans for a television series to follow up where Beverly Hills Cop 3 left off.
Production
In September 2012, it was announced that a series centred around Axel Foley's son Aaron (played by Brandon T. Jackson) produced by Shawn Ryan (who created The Shield and the 2017 revival of S.W.A.T.) has landed at CBS for a pilot order. It was also confirmed that Murphy would be reprising his iconic role in the series. Alongside Jackson and Murphy, Kevin Pollak and David Denman were cast in the pilot as Rodney Daloof, an irritating and incredibly risk-averse in-house attorney for the Beverly Hills Police Department and Brad, an honest and likable but socially awkward detective, formerly a baseball player and a musician, respectively. The Addams Family and Men In Black director Barry Sonnenfeld was attached to direct the pilot and serve as executive producer on the series. The pilot was filmed in March 2013 with Ryan posting on Twitter a photo of Jackson and Murphy on set. When the pilot was screened to CBS executives, it was received well, but not well enough to greenlight the series. As a result, the pilot got rejected and development on Beverly Hills Cop: Axel Foley continued until filming for the fourth finally started in August 2022 and is set for a release on Netflix at an unknown date. Murphy later stated that his appearance in the pilot doomed the chances of the show getting picked up saying "The reason that didn't get picked up was because [the studio] thought that I was going to be in this show, because [the lead] was my son: "And you're going to pop in every now and then". I was like, "I ain't popping in shit". "Well, we ain't making this TV show". I was in the pilot, but they wanted me to be there every week. The pilot was really good. It tested where they have these knobs [that you] turn if you like it. And whenever I came on the screen, Axel Foley would come on the screen, they turned it so they literally broke the knobs on the thing. It was like, "Damn, they breaking knobs?"[2] Ryan also stated that clashes with CBS also played a role in the series getting rejected saying "The official answer is they decided they liked other pilots better. If you look at what pilots they picked up that year, I think that's kind of incredible. I would say there were a lot of 400 lb. gorillas involved in the show and sometimes the gorillas don't always get along."[3]
Availability
Aside from the photo of Jackson and Murphy, Ryan posted to Twitter and an interview with Jackson conducted by TheHumorMill[4], no content from the pilot had leaked. On December 17th, 2022, MySpleen user Tygerberg uploaded a collection of unaired and rare TV pilots to the tracker. Among them was the Beverly Hills Cop pilot. It was then posted to the Internet Archive four days later.