Director Joe Carnahan Just Spilled the Beans on 'Bad Boys 3'

Director Joe Carnahan revealed exclusive details about 'Bad Boys 3.'

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

It’s going to be quite some time before we finally get to see Marcus Burnett and Mike Lowery bust heads in the third installment of the Bad Boys franchise, but when that day does finally come, director Joe Carnahan promises that it’ll have been well worth the wait. During a recent sit down with Collider, Carnahan—whose previous efforts The Grey and The A-Team prove that he knows his way around an action movie—unleashed a treasure trove of information that has us salivating for Bad Boys for Life.

Though we already knew that both Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are reprising the roles that turned them into full-blown movie stars when the original Bad Boys came out over 20 years ago, thanks to Carnahan’s loose lips we finally know who they’ll be pitted against. Well, sort of:

"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."

Carnahan added that the new film will take into account the decades that have passed since we last saw our heroes. “We’re certainly not ignoring that, and that is a part of it,” he added. “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.”

Fans of the originals will also be pleased to hear that Carnahan is aiming for a hard R rating, something he believes is attainable thanks to the whopping success of Deadpool:

I think it’s gonna be R. I don’t think we’re trying to make a PG-13 version of Bad Boys. 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.

Carnahan is still polishing off the script, which means we’re likely two summers away from seeing his vision on screen, as the studio eyes an early 2018 release. Until then, let’s just watch this on repeat, shall we?

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

Latest in Pop Culture