Eddie Murphy Had No Clue ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ Would Be A Hit

Jimmy Fallon pointed out a crazy fact about Beverly Hills Cop when Eddie Murphy stopped by last night. When the movie debuted in 1984, it was number one at the box office for 14 weeks. Fourteen weeks!  Forty years later, it’s WTF news when a movie like Barbie manages to hold the top spot for a month. Fourteen weeks? That’s practically a trimester. Did Murphy understand what a monster hit he had on his hands while making the film?

Murphy did not — and neither did anyone else associated with the movie. In fact, Murphy said, a script supervisor on the film “wanted to take an alias. She took an alias. She didn’t want to get a screen credit. It was like, ‘I don’t want anybody to know I had anything with this movie.’”

Murphy, now sporting a Will Smith goatee, couldn’t blame her since he didn’t believe it would be a hit either. “The movie was kind of doing this new thing, so nobody knew till it came out,” he said. That’s because, before Beverly Hills Cop, there really was no such thing as an action-comedy. 

“It was either action or a comedy, you know? They didn’t mix the two,” Murphy told Fallon. “Then Beverly Hills Cop is kind of the first action movie with cops and all that stuff where the action is serious and the bad guys are serious, but then really funny stuff happens. So it was like the beginning of this genre.”

The conversation led to the inevitable clip from Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the latest installment in the franchise that hits Netflix early next month. The clip featured two things very familiar to Murphy — his daughter (playing a cop) and his iconic Detroit Lions jacket from the original film. That thing must be getting a little dank at this point.

The new movie’s creators “were like, ‘Axel still has on the jacket,’” Murphy said. “I was like, ‘Really? Has on the same jacket from 40 years ago?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, it’s part of Axel’s whole look.’ It’s like Indiana Jones’ hat, I guess.”

Then, in a surreal moment, Fallon announced that not only did Murphy bring Axel Foley Detroit jackets with the word Netflix stitched into the collar for the Roots — the guys were thrilled, I’m sure — but for everyone in the studio audience as well. Murphy seemed embarrassed by the easy applause-getter. Notably, he wasn’t wearing that Netflix swag. But Fallon was predictably into it, going full Oprah while letting the crowd know that “YOU get a jacket and YOU get a jacket!”