Eddie Murphy “in talks” for that very weird Pink Panther reboot movie
We're not saying Murphy wouldn't make a great Inspector Clouseau, but the premise for this potential Pink Panther revival is just plain odd
Aux News Eddie Murphy
In what our brains can only conceptualize as “a potentially awkward entanglement at any future Bowfinger reunions,” THR reports today that Eddie Murphy is apparently in talks to star in a new revival of the Pink Panther film franchise. The film—centered, as always, on the ever-bumbling Inspector Clouseau, originally played by Peter Sellers, and later by Steve Martin, in the long-running series of films—is being directed by Jeff Fowler, who recently served as director/CGI teeth wrangler on Paramount’s Sonic The Hedgehog movies.
Not that this Pink Panther will be precisely like those other ones; as Fowler’s presence suggests, producers have apparently decided to get very literal with the concept this time around, pairing up Clouseau with a CGI version of the franchise’s mascot character for a sort of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? buddy cop thing that certainly sounds like something we’d make up to make fun of a movie like this, but which actually seems to be the real movie they’re trying to make.
(Film/animation nerds will know that the cartoon Panther originated way back in the Friz Freling-animated opening credits of 1964's The Pink Panther, and despite having no connection to the film’s actual plot, has proven so popular over the years that he still has an Oscar, and a side gig selling Owens Corning insulation, to his name.)
If he ends up taking the role, Murphy would finally be fully consummating a return to comedy that he’s been flirting with for years at this point—most notably with starring appearances in Kenya Barris’ You People and long-gestating sequel Coming 2 America in the last few years. But we haven’t seen him throw himself into a full-on comedic buffoon character like Clouseau since, what: Meet Dave, in 2008? (Give or take an occasional voice role as Shrek’s Donkey here or there.) We’re reasonably sure Murphy could totally nail the part of the ever-confident, endlessly incompetent Clouseau; we’re also not sure about how we feel about him sharing focus with an animated, ostentatiously colored cat.
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Granted its on Netflix, but ‘Dolemite Is My Name’ dropped in 2019…
Okay, but who’s going to play Cato?
Simu Liu?
I’d bet cash money that they try to get Ke Huy Quan but end up with someone like Bobby Lee.
Eddie Murphy. He is going to play all the roles except for the pink panther only because they talked him out of it.
“colored cat” – just a great decision to use this phrase, great job, raises all aroundEddie Murphy famously feels like he missed out on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, so he’s going to make a much much much much worse version
Well to be fair it’s, ‘ostentatiously colored cat’, which is accurate, but I probably would’ve gone with ‘fuchsia feline’ or ‘magenta moggie’.
you’re missing the off-color joke
Who Framed The Nutty African Prince . . . In Beverly Hills?
Oh dear, some studio executive somewhere has delusions of being a creative genius again.
Can we blame this on AI?
I don’t think there are any AI studio executives.
Hopefully this goes the way of that Ed Helms reboot of The Naked Gun.
Were they going to make one where everyone in it was actually naked?
I would enjoy seeing Murphy play a Clouseau, but I cannot stand the combo of live action and animation. It’s too distracting and WFRR was too gimmicky to be entertaining.
Naw, man. WFRR works because they make the cartoons look like cartoons and do things cartoons do, and not “Alvin and the Chipmunks but they look like real chipmunks and don’t do anything interesting.”
Well, the Pink Panther spoke in only a couple of the original shorts.But it does seem likely that the studio is going to want him to be a chatterbox in the remake. Probably played by Chris Pratt.
Oh, the weird one, right.
Everyone keeps calling Eddie Murphy a “comedic genius” but my lord is he ever terrible at picking his projects. Also, he’s absolutely the wrong person to play Clouseau, but in fairness, so has everyone else who has tried to fill the role outside of Peter Sellers. Nobody has yet been able to pair an attitude of absolute confidence paired with complete incompetence and klutziness like Sellers did, because nobody played it completely straight. Sellers made it look like his character’s accidents really were accidents – but with Martin, Benigni, et al., it was either mugging for the camera or clearly pratfalls.Eddie Murphy would never debase himself enough to reach Sellers’ level of commitment to the character, any more than The Rock would ever let one of his action hero characters be fallible in any way. It’s an ego thing. Not to say Sellers didn’t have an ego, but his Method Man approach to acting superseded it.
dolemite is my name has him pretty down and out and it was his best movie in a very long time. he gets pretty debased in dreamgirls, too. not saying he’s a great call for clouseau, but they aren’t all holy man.
I guess for me it’s a different “debasement.” In Dolemite his “debasement” was being something of a seedy kind of character, and he’s done that several times in his career – sometimes magnificently. But Clouseau isn’t seedy – he’s accident-prone and a fool who has no clue (har!) whatsoever that he is any of these things. There is no deadpan or mugging to his character. I don’t know that Eddie would surrender his cool so totally to disappear into that role without feeling the need to show the audience he’s in on the joke.
“…an attitude of absolute confidence paired with complete incompetence and klutziness like Sellers did, because nobody played it completely straight”This is why Alan Arkin’s is underrated – he did that.
Maybe it is going to be an almost “Harvey” type set-up?[Edit] Ignore this – I realized how stupid an idea this was just after I hit enter.
I remember thinking after watching Dolemite is my Name that Eddie Murphy was back but then I saw Coming 2 America.
Didn’t Ahnolt already do a teamup with “Cartoon Cat”?
His return to comedy was in DOLEMITE IS MY NAME. What the fuck are you even talking about?
tower heist (2011) also counts IMO.
They should pull a Tetris and make the Pink Panther movie a biopic about the guy who founded Owens Corning.