{"id":712451,"date":"2026-06-18T23:36:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T23:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/712451\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T23:36:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T23:36:09","slug":"key-peeles-police-academy-reboot-was-axed-amid-mike-brown-shooting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/712451\/","title":{"rendered":"Key & Peele’s ‘Police Academy’ Reboot Was Axed Amid Mike Brown Shooting"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMore than a decade later, Ike Barinholtz<\/a> is opening up about the Police Academy<\/a> reboot that was scrapped amid a rise in lethal police brutality.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe comedian noted that Keegan-Michael Key<\/a> and Jordan Peele<\/a> were set to star in the \u201cdirty, R-rated, modern\u201d take on the 1984 Hugh Wilson-helmed police comedy that spawned six sequels and two series, but the recent 2014 police killing of Black 18-year-old Michael Brown made the film seem in bad taste.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI can probably tell the story now. Years ago, my partner and I got hired to rewrite Police Academy for New Line Cinema,\u201d he started on his Funny You Ask<\/a> podcast. \u201cI don\u2019t even know if he\u2019s still alive, we might have to cut this\u2014but the guy who created the original Police Academy came with the deal. So, they said to us, \u2018We want you guys to write it and make it dirty, rated R, modern. He\u2019ll be at some of the meetings but we don\u2019t have to listen to him.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBarinholtz continued, \u201cAll he wanted to do was give us notes like, \u2018We would never do that in the first movie. No, no, no, Mahoney would never say that.\u2019 And he was adamant that we would have the original cast in the movie, he wanted them to have big parts and stuff. So when we\u2019re doing the pitch, my partner was like, \u2018So we have this scene and that\u2019s when we see all the original cast. We see Hightower, we see Tackleberry, we have\u2026\u2019 \u2014 he\u2019s just naming all dead people. And I was like\u2026he didn\u2019t even do research to find out who\u2019s still alive in the cast. Needless to say\u2026 he was not happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBubba Smith, who played Moses Hightower in the comedy franchise, died at age 66 in 2011. Eugene Tackleberry actor David Graf died at age 50 in 2001.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBut more importantly, as we were developing the film, Mike Brown got shot,\u201d noted Barinholtz. \u201cAnd we were making the movie for Key and Peele, and all of a sudden, people were like, \u2018We\u2019re not making a cop comedy right now where we\u2019re having these two hilarious Black actors play police officers.\u2019 Sorry, never happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Aug. 9, 2014, one year after the Black Lives Matter<\/a> movement took off, Fergus, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, who is white, shot 18-year-old Johnson six times, inciting more than a week of protests. That November, a St. Louis grand jury decided not to indict Wilson, and in 2015, the US Department of Justice cleared Wilson of any civil rights violations, determining he acted in self-defense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than a decade later, Ike Barinholtz is opening up about the Police Academy reboot that was scrapped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":712452,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[23716,88,13352,46724,95774,307170,206,307171],"class_list":["post-712451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-black-lives-matter","tag-entertainment","tag-ike-barinholtz","tag-jordan-peele","tag-keegan-michael-key","tag-key-peele","tag-movies","tag-police-academy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712451\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/712452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}