Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Mon 13 July 2026 19:45, UK
Whenever an A-list movie star makes a bad movie, especially one that flops at the box office, their first reaction is usually to play it as safe as possible and ensure their next picture is a nailed-on hit. Unfortunately for Eddie Murphy, it doesn’t always work that way.
For a recent comparison, look at Dwayne Johnson. His comic book blockbuster, Black Adam, didn’t get the sequel it was designed to set up, and neither did his voice-only role in another superhero caper, DC League of Super-Pets, with the festive farce Red One adding another quickfire bomb to his CV.
To combat the dent to his star power, he followed them up with Moana 2, which sailed past a billion dollars, and The Smashing Machine, the first proper acting performance of his career, which landed him a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actor – Drama’. However, the live-action Moana has already been declared dead in the water, with ‘The Rock’ now needing the next Jumanji to be a hit more than ever.
That was basically where Murphy found himself in the late 1980s. The first two Beverly Hills Cop flicks, Trading Places, and Coming to America, were all massive, so when his last release of the decade, Harlem Nights, went sideways, he was desperate to start the next decade off on the right foot.
“I got fucked up on Harlem Nights, so it was like, ‘OK, let’s do something that’s a sure hit,’” he explained in 1992, not that he needed to. That saw him retreat to familiar ground, reuniting with Nick Nolte for Another 48 Hrs, the sequel to his debut movie and big-screen breakthrough role.
It was made for tactical reasons, rather than creative ones, and that shone through in every frame. “The idea was contrived, and we threw it together, and they wrote these big cheques out, and we did it,” he elaborated, again, not that he needed to, because the follow-up’s entire existence was blatantly cynical.
The thrown-together buddy cop caper was battered by critics, and not for the first or last time in his career, Murphy admitted that he’d phoned it in. “Everything came too easy,” he acknowledged. “And when the laughs come easy, you start doing things like walking through movies. You start getting out of control. You start tripping. You argue. You get the big head.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
That wasn’t even the worst of it; having held his hands up and said what everyone already knew by calling Another 48 Hrs a high-paying cash-grab made specifically to put him back on top of the pile after the disappointment of Harlem Nights, the worst part of it all was that Murphy had let himself get out of shape.
Those were his words, not ours, with the Saturday Night Live favourite recalling how “there’s nothing like going into a movie theatre and looking up on the screen, and you’re a fat guy in a bad movie,” which neatly sums up how apathetic he was toward Another 48 Hours from beginning to end.
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