The “shitty” movie Eddie Murphy knew would fail: “He’s just showing up and getting paid”
Let’s be honest, if someone offered you tens of millions of dollars to do something that you knew would be terrible, would you say no? Of course not, and that’s why Eddie Murphy nosedived in a nutshell.
For a while, he was untouchable. From Trading Places to Coming to America, he took top billing in five consecutive movies that made at least $120 million at the box office, and the only non-narrative feature he starred in during that run was the highest-grossing stand-up comedy special of all time.
All of this happened well before he’d turned 30, too, but it’s impossible to remain Hollywood’s most bankable name forever. Once Murphy slipped from his pedestal, he never managed to haul himself back on, and by the mid-2000s, he was more synonymous with the Razzies than anything else.
He’s an obscenely rich man, but that’s also one of the reasons why his star power became so dimmed. The Academy Award nominee developed a habit of saying ‘yes’ to things he knew sounded terrible on paper, but he didn’t lose any sleep over it because his bank balance was being drastically increased.
They call it the ‘movie business’ for a reason, and in terms of Murphy’s financial profile, business has been booming for 40 years. He made films he wasn’t interested in because of the paycheque, and he turned down pictures that became smash hits because they sounded like too much work, but he doesn’t care.
That’s why he squandered any potential he had following his post-Dolemite Is My Name revival; he could have struck while the iron was the hottest it’d been in years, but instead, his entire filmography since then is comprised entirely of legacy sequels and formulaic straight-to-streaming fare, with more to come.
It’s a pattern that Murphy has been repeating for years. The Nutty Professor, celebrated by the man himself as his greatest-ever performance, and the movie that stuck a middle finger up at the critics who’d written him off as a has-been, was immediately followed by the turgid and forgettable flop, Metro.
The action comedy was Carmen Ejogo’s first major big-screen appearance, and she was under no illusions as to why he’d signed on. “He gets told, ‘There’s this script, it’s a bit shitty, are you interested?’ ‘No, not really,'” she recalled to The Standard. “‘Well, you know, we’re going to give you $30 million to do it’. ‘Yeah, all right, then’. And that’s where he’s at. He’s not doing it to be the next Poitier.”
The actor might be paraphrasing, but Metro was still shite, and it flopped at the box office. “It is what it is for him, and that’s what he’s like on set,” Ejogo said, suggesting that he knew fine well the film would fail.
“He’s just showing up and getting paid, whereas I was like, ‘What’s the motivation here?'” There was only one thing motivating Murphy, or to be more accurate, 30 million things.
