After years of waiting, it looks like Bad Boys is coming back to theaters – and they are not holding back. The beloved franchise will return after more than a decade with both Will Smith and Martin Lawrence reprising their roles. So far, fans know little about the film other than the fact that it’s happening, but that has now changed. Recently, Joe Carnahan spoke to Collider about the franchise’s explosive comeback.
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The director said Bad Boys 3 was still having its script treated with a rewrite. After the revision is complete, Carnahan said they would quickly move into production with the film’s stars. As for the time that has passed between now and the last Bad Boys film, Carnahan said his team wants to explore what period in the third movie.
“We’re certainly not ignoring that, and that is a part of it,” he said. “What happens 15 years on and where’s your life at now and what did you foresee yourself, it’s really rich material in that way. That part I’m really excited about, it’s a lot of exploring where are they now.”
When it comes to ratings, the director felt confident that Bad Boys 3 would get a R-rating. “I think it’s gonna be R. I don’t think we’re trying to make a PG-13 version of Bad Boys,” Carnahan said.
“We haven’t discussed the rating, but both the other films were R-rated; Deadpool made $800 million globally and was an R-rated film, the new Wolverine is R-rated. I think these things don’t factor it, my theory is people gravitate more toward R-rated films than PG-13, I think the PG-13 thing is betwixt and between now. It’s not fundamentally rooted in any metric where you can go, ‘Okay, we can prove that this had success because it was PG-13.’ Look at the Matrix trilogy, that was wildly successful and they were all R-rated films. Unless things change, I think we’re making a Bad Boys film and that’s an R-rated movie.”
If Bad Boys 3 is given a R-rating, fans can expect to see plenty of swearing and violence. Of course, much of that graphic action will come from the movie’s villain. Or, well, villains.
Carnahan said Bad Boys 3 will have more than one baddie and compared them to a “multi-headed hydra.”
“It wasn’t challenging [coming up with the antagonist]. It should’ve been. You’ve got all these years in the game and you’ve made all these enemies, you’ve accumulated all this, so in that respect it would be easy. But I don’t wanna say anything else because I don’t wanna ruin the delicacy of who our antagonist is, because I think it’s very cool. It’s not one person. It’s a multi-headed hydra, I’ll say that. It works beautifully,” he explained.
Bad Boys 3 is slated to hit theaters on January 12, 2018.
[H/T] Collider