EXCLUSIVE: Paramount has set Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah to direct its long awaited fourth installment of the Beverly Hills Cop series. The Belgian writer-directors are best known for their edgy drama Black, which won the Discovery Award at the Toronto Film Festival last year. The studio, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Eddie Murphy have been working diligently to get the script and elements right for a film that had been once been slated to be released this year. They loved Black, and when they met with the filmmakers, they were charmed to discover how important the original Beverly Hills Cop was to them. Even though this is a major step up from the budget of their last film, this became an opportunity to reframe a venerable franchise with youthful energy. They will direct a script by writers Josh Appelbaum & Andre Nemec that will bring Murphy’s street smart cop character Axel Foley back to his Detroit origins. It is gritty with the trademark irreverent humor that powered the first three films to north of $735 million in global box office.

The directing duo made a splash in Toronto with Black, a Romeo & Juliet story about a 15-year-old girl in a black gang in Brussels who must choose between loyalty and love when she falls for a Moroccan boy from a rival gang. El Arbi is a Brussels-based filmmaker of Moroccan heritage who studied at the Luca School of Arts in Brussels and directed the short film Broeders and the feature Image both with Fallah. He is also of Moroccan heritage and also studied at the Luca School of Arts in Brussels. Broeders won the best Flemish student short film at the Ghent International Film Festival and the audience award at the Leuven International Film Festival.

The hope is to get the film in production late this year or early 2017. Murphy next stars in the Bruce Beresford-directed Mr. Church, with Britt Robertson. Mark Canton and Courtney Solomon produced and the pic will be released in September by Cinelou.

The filmmakers are repped by CAA, Management 360 and Belgian agent Ken Lambrechts.

He hasn't been funny in years.

EXCLUSIVE: Beverly Hills Cop Axel Foley will come back to active duty…for Netflix. Paramount has made a one-time license deal — with an option for a sequel — that will enable Netflix to make the fourth installment of the film with Eddie Murphy and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. The studio had been developing a reboot for awhile. It is another example of studios striking inventive deals with Netflix at a time when long gestating sequels like The Shining followup Doctor Sleep, The Terminator: Dark Fate and Zombieland: Double Tap have been hard pressed to measure up to the grosses of their predecessors, with at least two of them in line to lose money because of the high cost of P&A.

This deal gives Netflix a sexy title with a big star and it gives Paramount an opportunity to reap revenue on a library title. Paramount launched the franchise in 1984 with the Martin Brest original, followed by a Tony Scott-directed second installment in 1987 and a third by John Landis in 1994.

This is the third deal between Paramount and Netflix after the streamer acquired Cloverfield: God Particle, which it launched with a surprise Super Bowl spot and a release after the 2018 game and acquired offshore rights on the Alex Garland-directed Annihilation with Natalie Portman, 17 days after its U.S. release by Paramount. Netflix made a similar deal with New Line when it took foreign on last year’s Shaft. All of those deals were for finished films; Netflix will work with Murphy and Bruckheimer to get a scripts and director and finance the Beverly Hills Cop reboot and release it on the streaming service.

It strengthens Netflix’s relationship with Murphy. Netflix’s hot new movie title has Murphy starring in the critically lauded Dolemite Is My Name, playing self made blaxploitation star Rudy Ray Moore. Murphy has also been in discussions to return to the stand up stage for Netflix for the first time since the 1980s, when he catapulted from Saturday Night Live to become one of the world’s biggest movie and stand up stage stars.

Paramount, in turn has Murphy starring in another sequel of one of his beloved characters, Prince Akeem in Coming To America.

Paramount has attempted numerous iterations of Beverly Hills Cop over the past few years, including an attempted TV series that Murphy was going to star in, but which never quite made it to the start line.

This sounds like a better landing place for Axel Foley.