Sony pulled a big power move earlier this month when it announced the release dates for 16 of its upcoming movies, daring all other studios to try and take on its Jumanji reboot or its never-gonna-happen Dark Tower adaptation. However, thanks to a disappointing—though hardly surprising—peek behind the curtain from The Hollywood Reporter, it’s starting to look like Sony was being pretty optimistic with more of those release dates than just The Dark Tower.
Two of the movies slotted in to Sony’s schedule—for February 17, 2017, and July 3, 2019—were a pair of Bad Boys sequels, the first of which has at least been in the works for a while. Based on THR’s report, though, so little progress has actually been made on Bad Boys 3 that Sony doesn’t even know if Will Smith will want to star in it. He’ll be involved either way, but if the movie’s shit doesn’t get real enough, then he might decide to hang back and just be a producer. This seems especially important in light of the fact that Michael Bay—who directed the first two Bad Boys movies—is most likely not going to be behind the camera for these sequels. Without Bay’s famous penchant for knowing when to make shit get real, there’s a good chance Smith won’t be as interested in doing it.
We still haven’t heard much about whether or not Martin Lawrence will be up for these Bad Boys sequels, but someone should probably ask him just to be polite.