Will Smith said it, Martin Lawrence said it…a lot, and Sony even gave it a title. But it looks like Bad Boys 3 aka Bad Boys For Life is officially a thing. Yes, we’ve been down this road before, but they really mean it this time! Lawrence even went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to kinda sorta confirm a shooting date. Maybe.
Just going by the video, there’s a lot of conjunctions and qualifiers on the March 2017 shooting date. If they can get everyone’s schedule to line up. If they get the script right. Maybe March. None of it seems definite. Even the fact that the film has a release date isn’t a sure sign of anything because these days, studios handout release dates like Halloween candy.
The one encouraging sign — and one that backs up Marty Mar’s words — is an interview director Joe Carnahan did back in August. Carnahan takes over for Michael Bay since he’s busy instructing robots in disguise on how to make him billions of dollars. While those are certainly big shoes to fill, the director of The Grey seems more focused on very thing Lawrence is focused on: Getting the script right before a single frame is shot.
“Unless you’re Toy Story 3, usually third ones aren’t the strongest, and I think this one will be the strongest of the trilogy thus far,” Carnahan told io9.
He’s right. Picture a movie series you love then name how many of them manage to stick the landing on the third entry. Yeah, the list is pretty short, with the aforementioned Toy Story probably at the top of it. Outside of that little hurdle, he and Lawrence both cite busy schedules keeping this movie out our lives.
“We couldn’t all get in a room, go through this thing and really ring it out,” he said. “I’m a big believer in ‘Do the work at the script level until you’ve got something you know works.’ That everyone is happy with, the stars are happy with, the director is happy with, the studio is happy with.”
So there you have it. Bad Boys 3 or Bad Boys For Life — as our movie overlords wants you to refer to it as — is going to happen. It’s got a January 2018 release date so yeah, shooting next March sounds like the logical next step. If they push this thing back again though, they risk suffering the same fate as Zoolander 2, Independence Day: Resurgence, and other sequels that waited way too long and struck when the iron was ice cold.
