More than a decade later, Ike Barinholtz is opening up about the Police Academy reboot that was scrapped amid a rise in lethal police brutality.
The comedian noted that Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele were set to star in the “dirty, R-rated, modern” take on the 1984 Hugh Wilson-helmed police comedy that spawned six sequels and two series, but the recent 2014 police killing of Black 18-year-old Michael Brown made the film seem in bad taste.
“I can probably tell the story now. Years ago, my partner and I got hired to rewrite Police Academy for New Line Cinema,” he started on his Funny You Ask podcast. “I don’t even know if he’s still alive, we might have to cut this—but the guy who created the original Police Academy came with the deal. So, they said to us, ‘We want you guys to write it and make it dirty, rated R, modern. He’ll be at some of the meetings but we don’t have to listen to him.’”
Barinholtz continued, “All he wanted to do was give us notes like, ‘We would never do that in the first movie. No, no, no, Mahoney would never say that.’ And he was adamant that we would have the original cast in the movie, he wanted them to have big parts and stuff. So when we’re doing the pitch, my partner was like, ‘So we have this scene and that’s when we see all the original cast. We see Hightower, we see Tackleberry, we have…’ — he’s just naming all dead people. And I was like…he didn’t even do research to find out who’s still alive in the cast. Needless to say… he was not happy.”
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Bubba Smith, who played Moses Hightower in the comedy franchise, died at age 66 in 2011. Eugene Tackleberry actor David Graf died at age 50 in 2001.
“But more importantly, as we were developing the film, Mike Brown got shot,” noted Barinholtz. “And we were making the movie for Key and Peele, and all of a sudden, people were like, ‘We’re not making a cop comedy right now where we’re having these two hilarious Black actors play police officers.’ Sorry, never happened.”
On Aug. 9, 2014, one year after the Black Lives Matter movement took off, Fergus, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, who is white, shot 18-year-old Johnson six times, inciting more than a week of protests. That November, a St. Louis grand jury decided not to indict Wilson, and in 2015, the US Department of Justice cleared Wilson of any civil rights violations, determining he acted in self-defense.
