Bad Boys For Life Directors Met With Marvel And DC, Looking For Right Character

The directors of Bad Boys For Life are referring to their journey as “living a fanboys dream.” Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah met in film school and clicked quickly, having similar interests and diving into projects of their own. Fallah says flat out, “We are the luckiest fanboys in the world.” This is all in reference to having the opportunity to work with Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, and the rest of the crew on a Bad Boys film, having grown up huge fans of the first two movies. Still, they may not want anybody to pinch them, because that fanboy dreaming looks like it might continue in a major way.

The directing duo don’t have any concrete plans but they have already been courted by both major comic book franchises for big screen projects. “So far, we also had a meeting with DC,” El Arbi told Comicbook.com. “Obviously, we said, ‘Hey, 30 years if there’s a new Batman, we’re still here!’”

More seriously, the duo opened up about where they are now with the possibilities on the Marvel or DC front. “We’re huge Marvel fans but it was just talks at this point,” El Arbi said. “There was nothing yet concrete. If we find something that we really love and that fits to our personality then, yeah, for sure, we go for it. It would be an honor to work with them. We are exploring at this point. We are looking for what is the right character, right storyline to go. If they have something, if we have something, I hope that very soon we find something and we can work with Marvel or DC, as well.”

As kids, El Arbi and Fallah had limited access to comic books and, as a result, the characters within them. A few mainstream heroes made their way onto the radar. “Spider-Man came to us,” El Arbi says. “When we were young, we watched the cartoons of Spider-Man and obviously the first movies. It was mostly DC characters like Superman and Batman that we really loved. For us, we grew up with them and, personally, always Batman.”

Their work is hardly finished. The duo is already set to head up Beverly Hills Cop 4 for a Netflix release and may ultimately find themselves heading back to a fourth film in the Bad Boys world. “It would be great,” El Arbi says of a fourth film. “We cannot make the movie three hours but if we have the chance to make a fourth movie, there are a lot of things we can do with [the new characters].”

Watch ComicBook.com’s full in-depth interview, taking a deep dive into Bad Boys For Life with the directors, in the video above! Bad Boys For Life is available now on blu-ray and 4K.

(Photo: Getty/Jemal Countess/Stringer)