Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F's Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score Becomes Franchise's Second Best By Just 3%

Summary Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F has received a Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 89%.

This is the second-best score of the entire franchise behind the original movie.

Axel F reverses the Rotten fortunes of the first two sequels in the franchise.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F has earned the second-place Rotten Tomatoes audience score of the franchise by a hair. The new Netflix movie is a legacy sequel to the original action-comedy trilogy that ran from 1984 to 1994, featuring Eddie Murphy reprising his title role as fish-out-of-water Detroit detective Axel Foley. The Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F cast also includes returning stars such as Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Paul Reiser, and Bronson Pinchot alongside franchise newcomers including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Taylour Paige, and Kevin Bacon.

Now that Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F has been out for several days, Rotten Tomatoes has calculated an audience score for the movie out of more than 1,000 user reviews. At the time of writing, the movie's audience score is a demonstrably solid 89%. While the score could fluctuate as more reviews are added, especially during the first few weeks of the movie's release, this is currently the second-best audience score of the entire franchise, trailing just 3% behind the 82% audience score for the 1984 original.

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Axel F Brings The Franchise Back To Its Glory Days

It's The First Fresh Audience Score For A Beverly Hills Cop Movie Since 1984

The critics' and audience's Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F reviews have put the movie in a unique position, making it the first time that either score has been Fresh for an installment in the franchise since the original 1984 movie, let alone both scores. Because the review aggregator service requires at least 60% of a movie's reviews to be positive in order for it to qualify as Fresh, both of the original sequels earned Rotten splats by falling short of that number. Below, see the Rotten Tomatoes history for the entire quadrilogy:

Title RT Critic Score RT Audience Score Beverly Hills Cop (1984) 83% 82% Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) 48% 58% Beverly Hills Cop III (1994) 11% 35% Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024) 65% 79%

The movie also has the second-highest gap between the two groups of any movie in the franchise, with the audience score clocking in 14% higher than the critic score. While Beverly Hills Cop III has a bigger gap of 24%, that movie's audience score was still thoroughly Rotten, which gives Axel F a strong edge. While neither score has quite reached the heights of the original, the new movie seems to provide a return to form for the franchise that it hasn't seen in four decades.

The Rotten Tomatoes scores for Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F spell good news for the possible Beverly Hills Cop 5. While the sequel, which is currently in development, has not yet been officially greenlit, it seems entirely likely that Netflix will do so if the movie's viewership numbers turn out to be as positive as its critical reception within the first 30 days of its premiere. This will give the franchise an opportunity to produce a new movie with even better Rotten Tomatoes scores, potentially even exceeding the original.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes