Will Smith And Martin Lawrence Filming Bad Boys 4
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence made a video announcing Bad Boys 4 was in production.
The Bad Boys are back at it again, as Will Smith and Martin Lawrence announced to fans at CinemaCon that they were currently in the middle of shooting Bad Boys 4. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the actors were not present at the event, but they made sure to send a recorded message from the set to hype fans up for the new franchise installment. The Bad Boys sequel will be one of the first projects Smith films after his career plummeted last year following the infamous Academy Awards slap involving Chris Rock.
In the recorded video, Will Smith apologized for his and Lawrence’s absence and expressed his excitement about their current project, Bad Boys 4, which they have been filming for four weeks. Adding a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, Lawrence insisted that Smith correct his introduction and remove the apology, stating that the pair are, in fact, not sorry they couldn’t attend the con. Lawrence claimed that their fans deserved to know the truth on why they weren’t at the Colosseum to announce the film in person, so Smith happily obliged by saying, “We glad we not there, cuz we here and they paying us to be here, so we are happy that we here and not there.”
Smith then introduced Josh Greenstein, the president of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, whom he jokingly called the “bad boy” of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
The so far untitled fourth film, directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, reunites Will Smith and Lawrence with the filmmaking duo, who previously directed them in Bad Boys for Life, which was a big success, grossing $426 million worldwide on a budget of $90 million. Bad Boys 4 is being shot in Atlanta and does not yet have a release date. The plot will see Smith and Lawrence reprise their roles as Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett, respectively, and star alongside Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Paola Núñez, and Eric Dane.
Chris Bremner has written the Bad Boys 4 script, and Will Smith, Jerry Bruckheimer, Doug Belgrad, and Chad Oman are producing.
Lawrence praised the upcoming film in a recent interview, calling it the potential “best one of them all.” Bad Boys 4 is expected to attract significant attention, given that it is El Arbi and Fallah’s first feature film since Warner Bros. Discovery shelved their Batgirl project last summer. Additionally, Will Smith is still attempting to recover from the controversy surrounding last year’s Academy Awards and the success of this film could sway the recent-Oscar winner back into the full swing of his career.
Sony teased the film as part of their much-anticipated slate, which Greenstein said would feature 23 films this calendar year alone. Other highly anticipated Sony Pictures productions include the sequel to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, another Ghostbusters installment, and The Equalizer 3.
