Beverly Hills Cop is the movie that made Eddie Murphy a movie star, and it also launched a franchise so successful that we’re set to get a Beverly Hills Cop 4 more than three decades after the last film in the series. It’s almost impossible to see any other actor playing Axel Foley today, in the same way that imagining Will Smith in The Matrix just seems weird. But as with that near casting, it very nearly happened. And Sylvester Stallone was once set to play the role.
Seeing a movie role go from Sylvester Stallone to Eddie Murphy may sound crazy, the two stars have never made the same sort of films, but Beverly Hills Cop was once going to be a very different movie. As the movie’s director Martin Brest recently told Variety, when he signed on to the film it was to direct Stallone, not Murphy. He explained…
