Speed was almost Beverly Hills Cop III (for about 15 minutes)

Speed is so specific and iconic that one can’t really picture it any other way than Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, and a bus going 50 miles per hour. You can try putting Liam Neeson and his family in a car and promise to blow up a bomb if he stops driving, but you can’t make it Speed. And you certainly can’t make Speed into Beverly Hills Cop III, though a Paramount exec once proposed as much.

This news comes from the 50 MPH podcast, which is providing an oral history of the making and legacy of Speed ahead of its 30th anniversary. In the July 3rd episode “4 MPH/Paramount Hits The Breaks,” Paramount’s former Vice President of Production Don Granger speaks on being one of the only execs in Hollywood who wanted to give Speed a chance.

“I really wanted to try to mount the movie, and my last-ditch effort was I pitched it at our chairman’s lunch as a possible script for Beverly Hills Cop III,” Granger recalls. “I got about 15 minutes of traction before it was dismissed, because that was back when the mandate was to find a Beverly Hills Cop III. So I was like, ‘Let’s put Axel Foley on the bus.’ It was a Hail Mary, man. I might maintain it was a better movie, it would have been a better movie than ultimately what we got for Beverly Hills Cop III, but that was my final Hail Mary.”

Paramount put the Speed script into “turnaround,” which essentially means the studio dropped it, allowing for other interested parties to pick it up. Paramount came to regret it, even before the film became a blockbuster success. “Paramount tried to get me to bring it back to them. And it was a really difficult decision, because they were offering me a lot more money, and money that was guaranteed,” producer Mark Gordon shares in the episode. “Anyway, to make a long story short, I wouldn’t let Paramount have it back. They were really fucking angry.”

Speed landing at Fox “led to a very, very concrete and stringent and no-exceptions policy at Paramount, under Sherry [Lansing]’s regime, of no turnaround,” Granger reveals. Lansing, former Paramount chairman, confirms as much. “It just was like, ‘Oh my God, this is gone.’ And it had been put in turnaround. And I was devastated,” she tells 50 MPH. “And rightfully so, as it turned out. I mean, I’m wrong as much as I’m right but it, you know, was a massive hit and a wonderful movie.”