Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F hits streaming with, if not outright high anticipation, definitely a modicum of good will. The latest entry in the long dormant franchise sees superstar Eddie Murphy returning as slick talking Detroit cop Axel Foley, and it’s understandable that fans would be eager to see Murphy don the old Detroit Lions jacket and get the ol’ Beverly Hills band back together for a victory lap on Netflix. But 2024 also marks 30 years since the classic original Beverly Hills Cop—a movie that Murphy himself recently dubbed the first Black blockbuster. That legacy is indisputably important, even if that legacy is as complicated as contemporary Hollywood’s handling of race in the years since it hit theaters.

Murphy isn’t wrong about Beverly Hills Cop as a boundary-shattering moment in Black cinema. Starring a 23-year old Murphy as the motormouth Foley, it was a fish-out-of-water action comedy about a Detroit detective suddenly in Beverly Hills to solve a childhood friend’s murder. Murthy’s star had been steadily rising since he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live as an untested 19-year-old in 1980.

Studios were suddenly eager to work with Eddie, but it’s easy to see, in certain patterns that became common in many of his ’80s hits, that studios were also still very skittish about a Black leading man in big mainstream movies. In that early string of hit movies that made Eddie Murphy a star, he was often the cool Black guy sharing the screen with mostly white co-stars; it was a dynamic that indicated studios were consciously trying to avoid these films being seen as “Black movies” in spite of their charismatic Black leading man. In Beverly Hills Cop, he had no love interest—merely a conspicuously flirtatious “friendship” with Lisa Eilbacher’s character, Jenny Simmons. It wasn’t an anomaly; Eddie didn’t have a love interest in Trading Places or 48 Hrs., save for a brief rendezvous with a party girl played by future Miami Vice star Olivia Brown near the end of Hrs.

Immediately after 1987s Beverly Hills Cop 2, Murphy pivoted to making Black movies with their Blackness very much out front. With 1987’s masterful Coming to America, he presented a depiction of African royals; Harlem Nights featured a who’s-who of Black comedy icons as debonair hustlers from the 1940s; and 1992’s Boomerang was a look at young Black urban professionals—years before films like The Best Man made buppie rom-coms trendy.

It’s worth noting that this period also featured Murphy’s first real critical backlash, as white commentators felt cheated that the star was no longer delivering Axel Foley-esque hijinks and was now embracing his status as a Black leading man—and a romantic lead no less. He was also flexing his status as one of the biggest names in Hollywood—getting the kind of movies made that studios had shown little interest in before Murphy established himself. He even directed Harlem Nights himself, something that made him a prime target for critics eager to take him down a peg.

For all of the success he’d brought to studios and for all his success has done to refashion the image of the Black movie star, Hollywood was still very uncomfortable with what Eddie Murphy dared to be. Even director John Landis, who’d directed Murphy in the beloved Trading Places and Coming to America, griped about Murphy when they reunited for the misbegotten Beverly Hills Cop 3 in 1994.

Landis told Collider in 2005:

Cop 3 was a very strange experience.; The script wasn’t any good, but I figured, “So what?; I’ll make it funny with Eddie.”; I mean, one of the worst scripts I ever read was [the original] Beverly Hills Cop.; It was a piece of shit, that script.; But the movie’s very funny because Eddie Murphy and Martin Brest made it funny.; And with Bronson Pinchot… that was all improvised.; Everything funny in that movie is not in the screenplay, so I thought, “Well, we’ll do that.”; But then I discovered on the first day when I started giving Eddie some shtick, he said, “You know, John… Axel Foley is an adult now.; He’s not a wiseass anymore.”; It turned out… I believe he was very jealous of Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes doing these [straight roles].; If you notice, after Beverly Hills Cop 3 he did like four action movies.; So, with Beverly Hills Cop 3, I had this strange experience where he was very professional, but he just wasn’t funny.; I would try to put him in funny situations, and he would find a way to step around them.; It’s an odd movie.; There are things in it I like, but it’s an odd movie.

Landis seemed to not acknowledge the uncomfortable position Murphy’s early success had put him in. In the mid-1980s, he largely stood alone as a Black actor who was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. The discomfort of being the grinning Black guy with the trademark “hyuk-hyuk” laugh could’ve become a prison. Even a legend like Richard Pryor couldn’t escape Hollywood reducing him to a bumbling caricature at a certain point; it’s not hard to believe that Eddie’s dapper turn in the early ’90s wasn’t just a reaction to the Denzels of the world—it was also him determining his own fate in a sea of white would-be puppeteers.

Beverly Hills Cop, as the first Black blockbuster, opened the doors for superstars like Wesley Snipes and Will Smith to vault onto Hollywood’s A-list in the 1990s. But it’s telling that, even when notable Black folks break ground, systemic racism demands that they repeat the trick. Smith became the most bankable actor in Hollywood and yet he had to take a route similar to Eddie a decade prior, mostly playing the lone wisecracking, cool Black guy in movies where he was surrounded by stiff white guys.

Of course, conversely, Smith’s breakout role came via 1995’s Bad Boys, a movie that featured two Black leads (yet another asexual interaction with the white female lead—this time Téa Leoni) —a hit that should’ve proven that big action movies don’t have to have a white foil for the hip Black lead. Smith walked the trail that Murphy blazed when he all but invented the buddy cop genre in the 1980s. It’s bittersweet that the Bad Boys franchise, like Beverly Hills Cop, was resurrected this year. The box office success of Bad Boys: Ride Or Die is being hailed as a cineplex savior—but will its success, with Smith and Martin Lawrence front-and-center, make studios more embracing of big-budget Black movies?

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F should be a victory lap. Murphy has more than earned it. If it charms audiences, the film could be proof that even old franchises can find new life. If not, it won’t hurt Eddie much. But when examining the legacy and influence of these movies, as we marvel at the talent and longevity of Mr. Murphy, let’s also cast a disparaging eye at an industry that keeps needing Black stardom to prove something. We beat the box office decades ago. Black movies no longer have anything to prove.