In the era of nonstop remakes, reboots, and reimaginings, it was only natural for there to be an attempt to revive Police Academy with an all-new movie. At one point, plans were in place for Key & Peele‘s Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele to revisit the franchise, but the idea was ultimately shelved after a real-life tragedy.
On a recent episode of his Funny You Ask podcast, comedian and actor Ike Barinholtz spoke about his involvement with the ill-fated reboot during a conversation with guest Joel McHale. Barinholtz recalled how he was working on a Police Academy reboot script with his writing partner, David Stassen, which was set to star Key and Peele in the lead roles. The plan was to have the new film be rated R with much more adult humor, but it should bring back the original cast. The first issue was that some of the actors from the original trilogy were dead by this point.
The Police Academy Reboot Wasn’t Meant to Be
“I don’t even know if he’s still alive, we might have to cut this, but the guy who created the original Police Academy came with the deal,” Barinholtz said. “So they said to us, ‘We want you guys to write it and make it dirty, rated R, modern.’ He’ll be at some of the meetings, but we don’t have to listen to him. All he wanted to do was give us notes: ‘But we would never do that in the first movie. Never, never, never. Oh no, no, no. Mahoney would never say that,’ and he was adamant that we would have the original cast in the movie.”
He added, “He wanted them to have big parts, and we were ‘yada yada.’ So when we’re doing the pitch, my partner was like, ‘So we have this scene and that’s when we see all the original cast. We see Hightower, we see Tackleberry, we have…’ — he’s just naming all dead people. And I was like… he didn’t even do research to find out who’s still alive in the cast. He was not happy.”
The Reboot Was Nixed After the Death of Michael Brown
This would have been manageable, but then the project faced a much bigger problem. In 2014, when the Police Academy reboot was still being scripted, a Black teenager named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer in Missouri, sparking widespread protests and increased scrutiny over the use of deadly force by officers. This led to the reboot immediately being shelved, as producers weren’t comfortable making a movie about cops being funny in the wake of the incident.
“As we were developing the film, Mike Brown got shot and all of a sudden, and we were making the movie for Key and Peele, and people were like, ‘We’re not making a cop comedy right now where we’re having these two hilarious Black actors play police officers,’” Barinholtz explained.
The Police Academy franchise was born in 1984 with the original film, which grossed over $149 million at the time to become a big box office hit. It spawned six sequels, with the final movie releasing in 1994, along with animated and live-action TV show adaptations. Attempts to make a reboot have come and gone since 2003 with no new project ever managing to make it out of development hell ever since.