Rush Hour 4 is reportedly a go at Paramount – after Donald Trump intervened on behalf of the movie.
The studio will now release the next sequel by Brett Ratner, the director, who had retreated from Hollywood after numerous allegations of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo movement.
Ratner had shopped the latest franchise entry, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, around Hollywood for years without success. But then Trump lobbied for the film to his friend and backer Larry Ellison, the largest shareholder of the new Paramount Skydance – which, earlier this year, as Paramount Global, settled a lawsuit with Trump over a critical CBS News interview with the president.
According to Puck’s Matthew Belloni, Paramount has secured funding for the film and agreed to a distribution deal with Warner Bros, which previously owned the fast-talking buddy-cop franchise under its New Line banner. “Get ready for the dumbest possible state-controlled media,” Belloni wrote on social media.
Ratner was accused of numerous instances of sexual assault in 2017, which derailed his career. He sued Melanie Kohler, a former employee of the Endeavor Talent Agency who alleged the director “preyed” on her at a club and raped her at the home of Robert Evans, the famed Hollywood producer, for defamation after she came forward; the two settled in 2018. In a statement from 2017, Kohler said she hoped Ratner would be held “accountable for the way he’s treated the nobodies of the world or at least the way he treated me”.
Ratner most recently directed a $40m documentary about Melania Trump for Amazon MGM Studios, owned by Jeff Bezos, the billionaire Amazon CEO, who has also maintained friendly relations with the president. The film is set to hit theaters on 30 January.
The first three Rush Hour films grossed over $850m worldwide and became hugely popular in China.
A fourth film was long in the works, though Ratner struggled to secure financing despite the movie industry’s increasing reliance on franchise fare and recycled IP.
“Does the world really need or want Rush Hour 4?” the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote. “If it did, surely we would have it by now? Market forces in the brutally commercial Darwinian jungle of franchise cinema would have created Rush Hour 4.”
The new film is widely seen as part of Trump’s second-term efforts to reintroduce old-fashioned masculinity into Hollywood culture, after appointing Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight and Mel Gibson unofficial “special ambassadors” to Hollywood.