Rush Hour 4 has reportedly been launched at Paramount after Donald Trump intervened on the film’s behalf.
The studio will now release the next sequel from director Brett Ratner, who stepped down from Hollywood following multiple allegations of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo movement.
Ratner had shopped the latest franchise entry starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker to Hollywood for years without success. But then Trump lobbied for the film with his friend and supporter Larry Ellison, the largest shareholder of the new Paramount Skydance — who earlier this year, as Paramount Global, settled a lawsuit with Trump over a critical CBS News interview with the president.
According to Puck’s Matthew Belloni, Paramount has secured funding for the film and has agreed to a distribution deal with Warner Bros., which previously owned the fast-talking buddy-cop franchise under its New Line banner. “Get ready for the stupidest state-controlled media ever,” Belloni wrote on social media.
Ratner was accused of multiple counts of sexual harassment in 2017, derailing his career. He filed a defamation suit against Melanie Kohler, a former employee of the Endeavor talent agency, who alleged that the director “hunted” her at a club and raped her at the home of renowned Hollywood producer Robert Evans; In 2018, both of them reached a compromise. In a 2017 statement, Kohler said he hoped Ratner would be held accountable “for the way he has treated the great people of the world or at least the way he has treated me”.
Ratner recently directed a $40 million documentary about Melania Trump for Amazon MGM Studios, which is owned by Amazon’s billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos, who has also maintained friendly relations with the president. This film is going to be released in theaters on January 30.
The first three Rush Hour films grossed over $850 million worldwide and became extremely popular in China.
A fourth film had long been in the works, although Ratner struggled to secure financing despite the film industry’s increasing reliance on franchise fare and recycled IP.
“Does the world really need or want Rush Hour 4?”. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote. “If that were the case, surely we would have had it by now? Market forces would have created Rush Hour 4 in the cruel commercial Darwinian jungle of franchise cinema.”
The new film is seen as part of Trump’s second-term efforts to reintroduce old-fashioned masculinity into Hollywood culture, after appointing Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight and Mel Gibson as unofficial “special ambassadors” to Hollywood.
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