Sony has been attempting to get a third BAD BOYS film off the ground for quite some time, but it's fast becoming a reality now that they've set Joe Carnahan up to write the direct. Although threequels typically wind up being the weakest of the bunch, Carnahan recently boasted that he believes BAD BOYS FOR LIFE will be the "strongest of the trilogy thus far." Carnahan has been working on the script for the better part of a year and Sony even pushed the release date back from summer 2017 to early 2018 in order to give him more time to work on it. Collider recently caught up with Carnahan who said that the script is currently undergoing a rewrite and the project will be entering pre-production just as soon as everyone signs off on it. As for what the plot might entail, Joe Carnahan teased that the amount of time which has passed since we last checked in with Marcus (Martin Lawrence) and Mike (Will Smith) won't be ignored.
We’re certainly not ignoring that, and that is a part of it. What happens 15 years on and where’s your life at now and what did you foresee yourself, it’s really rich material in that way. That part I’m really excited about, it’s a lot of exploring where are they now.
A lot will likely have changed for our crime-fighting duo by the time BAD BOYS FOR LIFE is released, but one thing which won't change is their R-rated shenanigans.
I think it’s gonna be R. I don’t think we’re trying to make a PG-13 version of Bad Boys. We haven’t discussed the rating, but both the other films were R-rated; Deadpool made $800 million globally and was an R-rated film, the new Wolverine is R-rated. I think these things don’t factor it, my theory is people gravitate more toward R-rated films than PG-13, I think the PG-13 thing is betwixt and between now. It’s not fundamentally rooted in any metric where you can go, ‘Okay, we can prove that this had success because it was PG-13.’ Look at the Matrix trilogy, that was wildly successful and they were all R-rated films. Unless things change, I think we’re making a Bad Boys film and that’s an R-rated movie.
As for who Martin Lawrence and Will Smith will be butting heads with in BAD BOYS FOR LIFE, Carnahan revealed that there will be miltiple antagonists this time around.
It wasn’t challenging [coming up with the antagonist]. It should’ve been. You’ve got all these years in the game and you’ve made all these enemies, you’ve accumulated all this, so in that respect it would be easy. But I don’t wanna say anything else because I don’t wanna ruin the delicacy of who our antagonist is, because I think it’s very cool. It’s not one person. It’s a multi-headed hydra, I’ll say that. It works beautifully.
BAD BOYS FOR LIFE is currently slated for a January 12, 2018 release.