Why Did Eddie Murphy Stop Making Buddy Action Comedies?
The Pickup stars Eddie Murphy and another former Saturday Night Live cast member as wisecracking “mismatched armored truck drivers” who are attacked by a gang of “ruthless criminals” and forced to rob a casino. And apparently, it’s coming out this year, and not in, like, 1997.
Co-starring Pete Davidson and Keke Palmer, The Pickup looks like the kind of buddy action comedy that Hollywood used to churn out with some regularity. Promisingly, it was directed by Tim Story, who also made Barbershop, Ride Along and the underrated meta-horror comedy The Blackening. But it’s also a return of sorts for Murphy.
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Murphy, of course, launched his movie career by starring in one of the most famous buddy action flicks of all-time: Walter Hill’s 48 Hours. The 1982 blockbuster starred Murphy as a slick criminal forced to partner with a surly, drunken cop played by Nick Nolte, who has seemingly stayed in character for the past 40 years.
For a while, it seemed as though pairing Murphy with a seemingly incompatible co-lead and having them fire guns and run from explosions for two hours was a pretty dependable formula. He also made Another 48 Hours, Metro and even the first three Beverly Hills Cop movies were, to some extent, buddy action comedies.
But apart from last year’s Beverly Hills: Axel F, which mostly sidelined Axel’s buddies in favor of a father-daughter storyline, prior to The Pickup, Murphy’s last buddy action comedy was more than two decades ago. What happened?
Well, for starters, back in 2002, Murphy made not one, but two movies belonging to this specific subgenre. And they were both real stinkers. That March saw the release of Showtime, the film that dared to ask what if the TV show COPS starred Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro?
Later that year came I Spy, which paired Murphy with Owen Wilson for a remake of the classic Bill Cosby-starring TV series, which Murphy may or may not have made purely to spite Cosby. Not unlike 48 Hours, Murphy played an outsider who has to team up with law enforcement. It wasn’t as good as 48 Hours, but at least it had more lame dick jokes.
Both movies were torn apart by critics, and neither managed to break even at the box office, which no doubt soured Murphy on making any more projects in this vein. Around that same time, Murphy found massive success making family movies such as Mulan, Dr. Dolittle, Shrek and Daddy Day Care. Even his crappy Haunted Mansion movie made more than $180 million at the box office. That’s more than three times what I Spy pulled in.
But with The Pickup, Murphy no longer has to worry about box-office receipts, because it was made by Amazon-MGM Studios and will seemingly debut on streaming. After all, who would want to see an action movie on the big screen, or watch a comedy with an audience?
