Bad Boys: Ride or Die’s $100 million production budget (a reasonable one in today’s Hollywood climate) might make it yet another easy win for everyone involved, as it’s earned over $120 million worldwide in just six days and shows no signs of significantly slowing down before the end of the month. That could soon be turned into enough interest for a fifth movie to be made.
According to legendary producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who recently talked to Deadline following the movie’s strong first weekend, conversations regarding another sequel could be happening sooner rather than later.
No longer attached to Michael Bay and after being left dormant for around 17 years, 2020’s Bad Boys for Life grossed over $420 million worldwide on a $90 million budget right before the Covid pandemic, so Sony and the creatives jumped on a sequel as soon as they could. Now, more than four years later, history is repeating itself, as audiences are still very much interested in Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett’s low-stakes and highly comedic adventures as they fight crime and corruption.
Bruckheimer, in spite of his extensive experience producing some of Hollywood’s biggest hits of all time across several studios, is humble enough to say he never knows what’s going to work for audiences: “If you make something the audience wants to see, they’re going to go see it. It’s that simple. If it works for them, they’ll line up. I wish we all knew what that was. We all have hits every time — [and then] we don’t.” He followed this up by saying that he thinks the audience is way smarter than anyone in Hollywood.
The full conversation is well worth a read if you’re looking for some insight into the process behind reviving a long-dormant action movie saga and other major projects that may or may not happen, but the highlight is how truly confident he seems about Bad Boys 5 becoming a thing: “We’ve had discussions, but we want to see how this one did at the box office, and I’m sure we’ll have conversations this week.” At this point, most box office pundits and the Hollywood trades are expecting the fourth Bad Boys, which is fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, to have good legs at least until A Quiet Place: Day One comes into the picture later this month.
Bad Boys: Ride or Die’s indisputable success also marks a big win for the directing duo of Billal Fallah & Adil El Arbi, who went off to make the scrapped Batgirl movie at Warner Bros. following the triumph of Bad Boys for Life and also directed the best episodes of Marvel Studios’ otherwise middling Ms. Marvel series. Sony could be interested in keeping them around beyond Bad Boys, as they’re heavily rumored to be circling the important gig of directing the fourth Tom Holland-led Spider-Man movie.
