Michael Brandt, one-half of the “Beverly Hills Cop IV” writing team (the other being Derek Haas) tells CineFools that their draft of the sequel (one which has changed a lot in the last month apparently) is quite dark – no Wonder World this time ‘round.

“ The studio and the producers called and said hey we just got a new draft of Beverley Hills Cop 4 and the writers we keep hiring keep trying to write a comedy and we don’t want a comedy. We want to make a down and dirty cop movie and then let Eddie be Eddie’’, says Brandt.’’ The original Beverley Hills Cop is a really dark movie – like his friend gets executed at the beginning of the movie. In fact I think it was originally meant for Sly Stallone back in the 80’s. It was going to be a hard core cop movie then Eddie came on and they kept the plot and a lot of the R rated violence and Eddie was just funny. So what they said to us was they wanted to go back to that.

Brandt says an old script of theirs, a buddy-cop movie titled “Dying Day”, was retootled to be “Cop 4”.

“ It was kind of a buddy cop thing set in LA with buddy FBI agents- but it wasn’t jokey at all, it was pretty hardcore. Everybody died in the end and it was the kind of movie/script that everybody who read it really liked but nobody was ever going to make.. Too dark. And [Paramount] said they would like to turn Dying Day into Beverley Hills Cop 4. We could kind of see how that could work and we said that sounds great and we were all for it and we’ll tell you where to send the cheque and the studios said no we want to bring you guys in to do some work on it and turn it into BHCP4. So we agreed and Brett Ratner came on to direct and we did our first draft of that and while it has gotten farther and farther away from our original script we’re kind of in between drafting that and a second draft coming up in a month or so.’’