Looks Like Trump Will Get the New ‘Rush Hour’ Movie He Asked For, Because That’s Just How Things Are Now
Whether he was enthusiastically weighing in on Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart’s breakup or waxing nostalgic for Gone with the Wind and Sunset Boulevard, Donald Trump has long seemed more passionate about movies than about policy. Yet aside from remaking the Kennedy Center in his own image and appointing Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight, and Mel Gibson as his “special ambassadors to Hollywood,” Trump’s actual influence on which movies get made has been indirect at best. That is, until now.
A few days ago, Semafor reported that Trump was trying to use his bully pulpit to get some of his favored movie projects greenlit. Chief among them? A revival of Paramount Pictures’ Rush Hour franchise, a series of mismatched-buddy-cop films starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, whose first three installments grossed more than $850 million between 1998 and 2007.
A source “directly familiar with the conversations” told Semafor that the President had “personally pressed” Skydance Media’s David Ellison to greenlight a fourth Rush Hour movie. Skydance, you may remember, recently merged with Paramount Pictures, in a deal that Trump’s FCC approved not long after Paramount settled a legal fight with Trump over a 60 Minutes interview by paying the President $16 million, an arrangement that many people, including some House Democrats, have called “a bribe.”
Today brought word, courtesy of Hollywood insider Matt Belloni, that Trump’s prodding was actually successful, and Paramount is actually moving forward with Rush Hour 4. Per Belloni’s report, it sounds like Brett Ratner will be back to direct, with producer Tarak Ben Ammar lining up financing. At long last, it seems we can all agree: today is the day Donald Trump truly became president.
The obvious question this move raises is, of all the movies, why Rush Hour?
Trump has an obvious and well known soft spot for old Hollywood glamour and Broadway musicals (he has said his favorite song is “Cats,” from the musical Cats, though the song is actually called “Memories”). He’s also famously fond of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Bloodsport. In a lore-defining 1997 New Yorker profile by Marc Singer, Trump screens that “incredible, fantastic movie” on his personal airplane, instructing his son Eric to fast-forward through the exposition in order to get to the fight scenes faster. The data point that Trump likes martial arts movies gets us a little closer to explaining why Rush Hour was a priority for him, though the Rush Hour films are arguably among the least martial arts-y of the Jackie Chan canon (the Jackie Chanon, if you will).
