Speed Was Pitched as a Beverly Hills Cop Sequel at One Point

As 90s movies goes, Speed is iconic. The 1994 film starred Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Joe Morton, and Jeff Daniels with the action film telling the story of a city bus rigged by a terrorist to explode if its speed falls below 50 miles per hour. The film was massively successful at the box office and remains a fan favorite nearly three decades after its release, but it at one point was pitched as a very different movie. During an appearance on the 50 MPH Podcast, the film’s producer Mark Gordon and former Paramount vice president of production Don Granger revealed that the film was pitched as a sequel to Beverly Hills Cop in a “Hail Mary” effort to keep the film at Paramount after the studio decided to walk away from the project.

“They probably thought it was kind of a goofy idea,” Gordon said. “You know, when you think about the idea of a bus, if you drop below 50 the bus is going blow up, that could be really silly, you know? And I think that ultimately the thing that made it kind of silly was the thing that made it terrific. It was not grounded completely in reality. The characters were grounded, but it was also funny. Graham [Yost] is a very funny writer. I think it had just the right level of fun and sort of popcorn-ness, but also, it was brutal. There was violence in it. So, we never got to the point of budgeting or having any real conversations. It was 8 just put into turnaround and they just said, you know, ‘Here you go, we’re not going to make this film. Good luck with it.’”

“I really wanted to try to mount the movie, and my last-ditch effort was I pitched it at our chairman’s lunch as a possible script for Beverly Hills Cop 3,” Granger said. “I got about 15 minutes of traction before it was dismissed, because that was back when the mandate was to find a Beverly Hills Cop 3 so I was like, ‘Let’s put Axel Foley on the bus.’ It was a Hail Mary, man. I might maintain it was a better movie, it would have been a better movie than ultimately what we got for Beverly Hills Cop 3, but that was my final Hail Mary.

Ultimately, the film found a home at 20th Century Fox not as a Beverly Hills Cop sequel and as was noted above, it was a major box office success. The film grossed $350.4 million on a $30-37million budget and was the fifth highest grossing film of 1994. The film also won two Academy Awards, one for Best Sound Effects Editing and one for Best Sound. The film helped establish Reeves as an action hero and was Bullock’s breakout role. Bullock returned for a sequel, Speed 2: Cruise Control, in 1997, but the film was a box office bomb and didn’t fare well with audiences or critics, some of whom consider it to be one of the worst sequels of all time.

What do you think? Can you imagine Speed as a Beverly Hills Cop sequel? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.