6 Good Facts About Will Smith & Martin Lawrence’s ‘Bad Boys’
A Hollywood franchise roared to life three decades ago when Bad Boys hit theaters on April 7, 1995. Directed by Michael Bay, the action comedy starred Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as Miami narcotics detectives investigating a heroin heist while protecting a key witness in the case.
Despite some reservations among producers about Bad Boys’ box-office viability, the film was a massive hit with audiences, and after three big-screen sequels, the Bad Boys franchise has a total haul of more than $1.2 billion worldwide. But let’s rewind the clock 30 years with fun facts about the making of the original film …
1 Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey were the original stars
Everett Collection
When Bad Boys was still a Disney project with George Gallo as screenwriter, Jon Lovitz was going to star in the picture with former Saturday Night Live colleague Dana Carvey as his buddy-cop. But Lovitz told The AV Club in 2010 that though he was eager to do the film, Gallo’s script was “awful,” the film moved to Columbia for production, and eventually, producer Don Simpson opted to go with two Black comedians as the leads instead.
“The script really wasn’t good,” Lovitz added. “The funny thing is, I’ve become really good friends with [producer] Jerry Bruckheimer, and every time I see him I go, ‘Give me another chance!’ And he says, ‘No, you’ll turn it down!’ And I go, ‘But I said yes!’”
And it turns out that the issue of the bad script wasn’t as big a hurdle as Lovitz had thought: “Jerry said, ‘Well, you guys could have improvised [dialogue instead of using the script]’ and I was like, ‘You never said that!’”
2 Arsenio Hall turned down the movie, much to his regret
Jeff Katz/TV Guide/Paramount Domestic Television/courtesy Everett Collection
Recounting the missed opportunities of his life in a 2013 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, talk show host Arsenio Hall said he turned down the chance to be Lawrence’s Bad Boys costar.
“You look back and say, It wasn’t a bad decision because I’m happy with my life. I’m a daddy or whatever,” he reflected. “But then you realize, that’s not where I’m supposed to be. One day you really miss it.”
3 Martin Lawrence’s sister helped get Will Smith cast
Martin Lawrence revealed to Jimmy Fallon in 2024 that he wanted to do Bad Boys with Eddie Murphy, but Murphy proved too expensive a costar. Ultimately, Lawrence’s sister Rae sold him on the idea of sharing the screen with Will Smith.
“And so I called Will and said, ‘Could you come to my house, have a dinner, and talk? I want to talk about this movie,’” Lawrence said. “And he came to the house, and, you know, after talking to Will for five minutes, sold.”
4 The film made Smith a sex symbol
Everett Collection
In his 2021 memoir, Smith said Bay insisted that he take off his shirt in Bad Boys. Smith resisted, and eventually the two compromised that the actor would wear an unbuttoned shirt over his bare chest. “Up until this point in my life, I had used comedy to attract women,” Smith explained in the memoir, per Business Insider. “And now I was being objectified.”
Smith loved his transformation into a sex symbol: “It was wonderful. All I could think was, ‘OK, Michael Bay, you were right. I was wrong. Thank you.’ From that point forward, directors had to argue with me to keep my shirt on.”
5 A stunt gone wrong put Téa Leoni in the hospital
Columbia Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
Téa Leoni told Movieline in 2001 that filming her role as Julie Mott in Bad Boys was “a really hard experience,” as she “was like a rag doll being slammed around” in the action-packed production.
Leoni recalled that being thrown through a plate glass window “wasn’t so bad,” but a stunt with a gun landed her in the hospital. “It was the AK-47 under the jaw that got me,” she said. “I wasn’t on the proper mark when the stunt guy hit me with it. My legs went over my head and I landed flat on my back. Didn’t have much memory at that point.”
6 Bad Boys’ global box office proved studio naysayers wrong
Bay, who made his feature-film directorial debut on the project, told Fandango in 2017 that “the studio” — presumably Columbia Pictures — didn’t believe in Bad Boys “because a movie with two Black stars [had] never worked around the world.”
“I know the studio didn’t believe in our movie,” Bay said. “They didn’t treat us very well at all, and we were just kind of on our own. They gave us $10,000 for a rewrite, and I don’t know what you get for $10,000. So we had to make a lot [of] the stuff up.”
But Bad Boys earned more than $65 million dollars domestically and more than $141 million worldwide. “That was the very first movie that actually worked with two African Americans as the leads in the foreign market,” Bay added.
Remind 