Celebrity Measurements

The Former Fantastic Four actor will be gearing up for a run-in with the narcotics cops of the Bad Boys franchise.

One of the teases unveiled at CinemaCon this week during the Sony panel is the follow-up to the successful third entry in the Martin Lawrence-Will Smith buddy cop action comedy Bad Boys. Bad Boys for Life was the most successful movie of 2020 when it was released at the beginning of the year, before COVID shut down the theaters for a while. Even without the pandemic, the film likely would have raked in the cash due to the popularity of the first two films.

According to Deadline, Ioan Gruffudd, known for his turn as Reed Richards in 2005’s Fantastic Four, has now joined the cast. Gruffudd is said to be playing Lockwood, a high-profile lawyer running for election. The plot is kept under wraps, but Will Smith and Martin Lawrence will appear at the Sony panel with a pre-recorded message stating that they are currently filming their fourth week. The duo recorded the video on location in Miami, the same city where all three movies of the trilogy were filmed.

Sony brought back Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah and their directing partners to direct this release. They took over the direction of Bad boys for Life from Michael Bay. Arbi and Fallah are also known to have recently directed the notoriously scrapped superhero movie, Batgirl at Warner Bros before the regime change. Together with Chris Bremner, they also wrote the script for Bad Boy 4. It has been announced that Vanessa Hudgens and Alexander Ludwig will reprise their roles from the last film. The fourth film was made quickly after the success of the third. Although it was already planned to expand the franchise further, especially with the set-up of Mike Lowery’s son being recruited for police work, Sony jumped on the project after the box office numbers of the last film, and it would seem that Smith is eager to rebound his career after an infamous incident that some people may have heard of that happened at an awards show.