Listen, we'll cop to it.
We had very low expectations for Bad Boys For Life.
17 years since the first sequel, when that first trailer dropped for the new action-comedy-thriller, we remained thoroughly unimpressed. And then the press were mostly kept away from it in the week leading up to movie's release, which is NEVER a good sign.
And then the movie came out... and it wasn't terrible. In fact, it was pretty good! Sure, it borrowed a lot from the Fast & Furious movies (family comes up, A LOT) and the Mission: Impossible movies (Will and Martin are now part of an elite squad), but there is no shame in stealing borrowing from the best in the game.
The Rotten Tomatoes score of 76% is actually higher than the first two movies' scores combined (42% and 23%, respectively), and word of mouth really set this one off.
With a production budget of $90 million, the movie has already made $105 million in it's worldwide opening weekend, with $68 million of that coming from the States, making it the biggest January opening weekend there ever.
Comparatively, the movie opened against Robert Downey Jr.'s first post-MCU role, Dolittle (released here on Friday 7 February), reportedly cost $190 million to produce, and it made $30 million in that same opening weekend, despite being a family movie and therefore having a much-larger potential audience.
All of this is good news for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, as a fourth Bad Boys movie has already been given the greenlight, and we'd imagine they'll want to strike while they're still hot, so expect to see it arrive in cinemas around the very end of 2021 or the very start of 2022.
Check out our review of the long-delayed threequel (and the rest of this week's new big screen releases) right here:
