Watch Bad Boys on Amazon Video FREE for 30 days
Another franchise veteran is returning for the fourth Bad Boys movie. Vanessa Hudgens will in fact reprise the role of Kelly in the next one Bad Boys 4. He will join a cast that includes the main leads: Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Filming on Bad Boys 4, which will be directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, with a script written by Chris Bremner, is expected to begin in the coming months.
Plot details are currently being hidden at Bad Boys 4, outside of the idea that it will follow the ongoing adventures of Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence). “We had a great experience with the first film, both through the development process with Tom Rothman (president of Sony) and his team, and through the editing process and shooting… We have put together a film that is very satisfactory to the public. We are currently working on a draft for the fourth,” franchise producer Jerry Bruckheimer said in a 2020 interview.
Great success for the first Bad Boys
The franchise of Bad Boys rose to prominence when the original film debuted in 1995. The action-comedy series chronicles the adventures of Smith’s Marcus Burnett and Lawrence’s Michael “Mike” Lowrey, two Miami narcotics agents tasked with ridding the streets of criminals. Directed by Transformers series director Michael Bay, the first Bad Boys film received mixed reviews, but became a box office hit, grossing over $141 million on a $19 million budget.
The success of Bad Boys led to two follow-up films in 2003’s Bad Boys II and 2020’s Bad Boys for Life. Bad Boys II also featured Gabrielle Union as a DEA Special Agent, as well as cameos from NFL Hall-of-Famer Dan Marino and Megan Fox , generating over $273 million in global ticket sales. Bad Boys for Life, meanwhile, saw Marcus convince Michael to retire after hanging up his badge after the previous film. The People’s Choice and NAACP Image Award-winning film was the best of the series commercially and critically, grossing over $426 million at the global box office. However, her film success couldn’t help the 2019-2020 series LA’s Finest, a spinoff starring Union’s Sydney Burnett, as it was unceremoniously canceled after two seasons.