This was going to be a tough task for any director coming off the franchise-topping $426 million success of “Bad Boys for Life.” Luckily, “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” has two directors at the helm — Belgian directing duo Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, known collectively as Adil & Bilal.
In this fourth installment, Aadil and Bilal frame Miami PD detectives Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) for crimes they didn’t commit. And the production also had to overcome several hurdles before the path to success was clear. First, Smith received a 2022 Oscar; then production was suspended due to Hollywood’s historic double strikes.
The film hit theaters June 7 and became the first Hollywood summer box office smash to gross $106 million at the global box office from a $100 million production budget (not including the cost of the lavish world tour undertaken to promote the film). To date, the film has earned $227 million worldwide, bringing the “Bad Boys” franchise’s box office haul to over $1 billion globally.
They haven’t received official word from Sony chief Tom Rothman or stars Smith and Lawrence that they’re up for a fifth film in the franchise, but the directing duo certainly has ideas.
“[‘Bad Boys’ producer] Jerry Bruckheimer has a philosophy: You have to make something that people want to see, and that’s more important these days than ever,” says El Arbi. “We make every movie like it’s our last. Because it could be, so we have to go all the way.”
Fourth installments are difficult. Did you ever fear that the audience wouldn’t come?
Adil El Arabi: Always — especially these days, you’re never sure. In the post-COVID world, cinema is not the same, habits have changed, especially because of streaming, so yes, you hope. You’re trying to do your best, and you’re even more motivated this time to try to make it an event, get into the minds of the audience as much as possible and try to give them a satisfying experience. Over the weekend, we didn’t sleep.
Bilall Fallah: The day we finished the film, Adil was checking the tracking on Reddit. Every day we were analysing everything and asking everyone how is it going and will it work?
El Arbi: Thank you so much to all the Redditors, because I discovered a whole other world. How they analyze all the tracking and presales, and what it means, and the history of other movies. Reddit was a lifeline, so thank you to the Box Office Redditors. And Bilal was watching the reaction on Twitter.
What moment did people react to the most?
Falla: People applaud, people cheer, you feel like people are at a concert. It’s a real cinema experience and that makes me very happy. Will and Martin – you feel like there’s love for them all over the world.
Obviously everyone was talking about the Reggie scene [Marcus’s determined son-in-law, played by Dennis MacDonald, shows off his fighter photos to escape a group of bad guys] — that’s the MVP of the movie.
Let’s talk about the SnorriCam. It gives the experience of a first-person shooter video game. What was it like to use this new technology and see how your actors were able to operate it?
El Arbi: When we found out the budget was going to be about the same as the last film, we knew we couldn’t do crazy “Mission: Impossible”-level things, so we tried to find a way to make something new and interesting. Things that weren’t copies of the last film, but also weren’t copies of all the best action franchises, whether it’s “John Wick” or “Fast and Furious.”
So together with our cinematographer, Robrecht Heyvaert, who is from Belgium, we were brainstorming and checking the internet for interesting rigs, on social media — you have cinematography channels on TikTok and Instagram — and also video games to try to incorporate that aesthetic. Video games are now even bigger than movies.
This is where Robrecht found the SnorriCam, which had been used in the Russian film but had never been used in Hollywood before. The tricky thing is that, because the actor has to operate it himself, it’s not that easy. When we showed it to Will, he thought it was a brilliant idea. I thought it would be great until he had to wear it. It’s tricky because you have to be a camera operator with a very heavy rig and at the same time, you have to shoot a gun.
