“Those are my big three”: the only movies Eddie Murphy will always regret turning down
Being one of the biggest stars in Hollywood means that you’ll be offered the biggest roles in the biggest projects, so, if anything, it’s impressive that Eddie Murphy only has three massive regrets when he spent years as the single most bankable name in the business.
Looking back, his association with Paramount may have cost him, since he was so beholden to the studio that he only made one movie for a rival outfit between 1982 and 1996. Then again, when he was delivering hit after hit with 48 Hrs, Coming to America, Trading Places, and the Beverly Hills Cop trilogy, he probably didn’t mind too much.
Admittedly, he was miffed that nobody even bothered to ask him if he was interested in playing Sam Wheat in Jerry Zucker’s Ghost, which was fair enough, considering he was Paramount’s golden goose, and Patrick Swayze only ended up with the part when Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Michael J Fox, and others had already turned it down.
He also declined a role in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home despite being a fan of the sci-fi franchise since childhood, because he’d always dreamed of getting beamed up to the Enterprise. When he was asked if he wanted to play a street-level character who didn’t even get to sniff a spaceship, he decided that it wasn’t worth his time.
Murphy has a fair few regrets from the films he did make, though, which is understandable when so many of them were utterly woeful. In fact, things got so bad that when he realised he was more likely to win a Razzie than have another hit at the box office, he washed his hands of acting entirely for the better part of a decade.
Since his comeback, he’s dabbled exclusively in straight-to-streaming pictures, and it’s beginning to look as if he’ll never be restored to his former glories. Not that he cares, when he’s rich enough, successful enough, and knows he changed the course of Hollywood history forever at his peak, but there are still three flicks that he’ll always regret turning down.
“I was supposed to do Ghostbusters, and didn’t do that, and Rush Hour, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” he confessed. “Those are my big three, ‘wish I would have done’ movies. They were huge, giant hits. They were giant hit movies.” Not a bad trio to regret, but on all three occasions, he had his reasons, whether they were justified or not.
Instead of Ghostbusters, he made Beverly Hills Cop, which became the highest-grossing release of 1984 at the box office in the United States, beating Ivan Reitman’s classic supernatural comedy. Murphy opted to make Holy Man at the expense of Rush Hour, which wasn’t the smartest decision, and he knows it, since he’s trashed the film on several occasions.
To be fair to him, nobody wanted to play the lead in Who Framed Roger Rabbit before Bob Hoskins was cast. Harrison Ford, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and Paul Newman turned it down, too, and it didn’t dent his star power one iota to reject all three of them.
