Thanks to COVID-19, 2020 was Hollywood’s year without hits. With American movie theaters shuttered to prevent the spread of the deadly disease, studios kept their big guns under wraps, while simultaneously trying to figure out how the new paradigm of streaming services fit into their business models.
“What I think is most interesting is how the system of Hollywood that’s dependent on numbers started to be in question,” says director Craig Brewer. “It was shaky. With no box office, how could you judge a movie in this environment? By what numbers? You saw kind of a breakdown of everything that had been built around that.”
But that hit drought ended on March 5th. If your TV was on that weekend, odds are you were watching Brewer’s new film, Coming 2 America. According to Screen Engine, the independent firm that tracks streaming viewership, the Eddie Murphy comedy scored the largest audience of any release since the pandemic upended the movie business the previous March, handily beating both Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’s October release and Wonder Woman 1984’s Christmas audience. “The premiere of Coming 2 America has far exceeded any of our wildest expectations,” said Jennifer Salke, chief of Amazon Studios, who distributed the film.
Brewer broke into Hollywood with 2005’s Hustle & Flow, the now-classic hip-hop film starring Terrance Howard and Taraji P. Henson, which was produced and filmed in Memphis. The film earned Howard a Best Actor Academy Award nomination and a stunning Best Original Song win for Three 6 Mafia’s “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp.”
But what most people don’t recall about the film is its disappointing opening weekend. “I’ve never been successful in the way that Hollywood gauges your success: These are the numbers, and this is what we projected,” Brewer says. “I’ve never been in a situation in my career where I’ve met or exceeded the numbers. It’s always been a victory that is ultimately more rewarding, like awards that come later, or a movie becomes beloved over time on television, like Hustle & Flow. People embraced it over a decade or so. I can now say, ‘Well, I’ve got this on the books. I’ve at least achieved that thing that a lot of people in Hollywood think is ultra important.’ And not that it isn’t; it’s just not something that you’re thinking about while you’re making a movie. You just want it to be as good as it can be.”
Black Star Wars
Brewer first worked with Eddie Murphy on the comedian’s 2019 comeback, Dolemite Is My Name. In the 1980s, when Brewer was a teenager dreaming of making his own films, Murphy was conquering the world. “It’s great to be young and watch a star explode,” Brewer says.” You feel like you were part of it. And I think for our generation, we were there watching him explode on Saturday Night Live. Then he became a movie star and transcended all of it. People around the world were like, ‘America! Eddie Murphy!’ He was like Elvis.”
Dolemite Is My Name garnered universal praise and Oscar buzz, even though Murphy was not ultimately nominated, despite many thinking he should have been nominated for Best Actor. “They even joked about it in the Oscars’ opening monologue that year.”
Most importantly, the filming of Dolemite was a good experience for everyone involved. “[Murphy] was proud of his work, which he should be,” Brewer says. “He did a fantastic job. I’m really proud of Dolemite Is My Name. We realized that there was a good pairing there, a good team. So when he asked me about Coming 2 America, it seemed like this would be a great way to stay in the Eddie Murphy world. Eddie had been working on this idea for a couple of years, and I think now he was galvanized to move forward because he felt really confident with the way audiences were responding to Dolemite. And he was ready to tell this story.”
Following up a beloved film like Coming to America is an enterprise fraught with expectations. The 1988 film starred Murphy as Prince Akeem Joffer, the scion of Zamunda, a fictional country in Africa. Unwilling to acquiesce to a dynastic marriage arranged by his father, King Jaffe (James Earl Jones), he flees to America to find love — and what better place for a king in waiting to find a wife than Queens, New York?
Murphy’s co-star was Arsenio Hall as Semmi, the prince’s long-suffering best friend. The comic duo also played a series of memorable bit parts in the film, such as a pair of wisecracking old men in a Queens barbershop, and Murphy’s unforgettable turn as soul singer Randy Watson, frontman for Sexual Chocolate, who invented the mic drop. Like Hustle & Flow, the film had become part of the culture through decades of reruns on cable TV. “What the studio and Eddie would bring up all the time is, ‘Don’t underestimate how many people have watched Coming to America,’” Brewer says. “We nicknamed it ‘Black Star Wars’ because it comes with the same kind of complications as doing anything in the Star Wars universe.”
Murphy and Brewer took a script by the original writers Barry W. Blaustein and David Sheffield and reworked it with Black-ish writer Kenya Barris. Getting the tone right proved to be difficult. Murphy had made a name for himself with raunchy comedy, but some of what was funny and transgressive in 1988 wouldn’t fly today.
“We’re in a different place with comedy,” says Brewer. “Yes, you can just be as irreverent as you want to be, but that irreverence can’t equal offending people’s essence. As funny as [Akeem’s betrothed princess] Mani was jumping on one leg and barking like a dog, today, it’s gonna be received differently by 17-year-old women who are looking at a very authoritarian, patriarchal, misogynistic society, and saying, ‘Is that really something to laugh at?’
“What I find interesting about the conversation that is happening around Coming 2 America is that it’s the same thing that we were talking about in the early drafts. It was packed with nods to the original movie. I mean, they were coming out of the woodwork. I think we went to the Zamunda McDowell’s opening, and Sam Jackson robbed the place again. There’s plenty of criticism that all our movie is, is nostalgia, which, by the way, is what we wanted to accomplish. We always felt like we wanted it to be a return to your old friends. But there is also something rather interesting, a lesson. It’s like ‘Don’t you do anything with my original movie! And don’t you dare explore any of your woke themes in my Coming to America!’ But Akeem was looking for substance. He wanted a woman who had a mind of her own.”
Victory Laps
Shari Headley, who played Akeem’s love interest, Lisa McDowell, in the original film, was among the actors who returned for the sequel. She gets both a funny sequence with SNL vet Leslie Jones, and an emotional scene with Murphy as his loving wife and mother of three daughters. She’s not the only veteran Black actor who gets a victory lap. John Amos, famous first as the father from the seminal 1970s sitcom Good Times, returns as Lisa’s father, who shines when he gives Akeem a much-needed pep talk. “That was a special day working with him because the whole crew was just in awe of his whole legacy. He comes off so perfect in that moment.”
Brewer first worked with Wesley Snipes on Dolemite, where he played Murphy’s foil, director D’urville Martin. “I remember saying, ‘We need somebody that can go toe-to-toe with Eddie Murphy.’ When I pitched that to Eddie, he was like, ‘I don’t think there’s anybody except Wesley.’ I was like, like, ‘Oh my God, can you imagine?’”
In Coming 2 America, Snipes again plays Murphy’s rival — this time, General Izzi, leader of Zamunda’s neighboring country Nexdoria — and damn near steals the show. “He’s actually an inspiration to a lot of people. They go, ‘Man, I just like his attitude now.’ It’s at odds with what some people would predict how Wesley would be. And now that I’ve made two films with him, I’m just like, please, please, Hollywood. Are you seeing what everybody’s saying now? Can somebody back the money truck up to Wesley Snipes right now? Because we would like him back.
“I think when you’re directing movies, the big joy you get is adding actors and actresses that you have always dreamed of working with, and being able to somehow work within their craft,” says Brewer. “But among all those people is one of those actors. … I mean, there’s us, and then there’s James Earl Jones, right? When you asked me, what was it like to meet him and work with him? It was like I was sitting down with the end credits of Field of Dreams.”
The Quest
To maintain secrecy, Coming 2 America filmed under the code name The Quest, which was Murphy’s first title for the original film. “We finished principal photography right before the end of 2019,” Brewer says. “We did think that we were going to probably try to get a week in New York after we did an edit. This is common with a lot of big pictures. So there were some plans to explore that, but the more 2020 began to reveal itself to us, the less likely that became. … The pandemic hit, and then we really had to learn in real time what we could do with our editorial team, how we could work remotely.”
Brewer directed the edit via video conference, first alone in his Los Angeles apartment, then in his Memphis office in Crosstown Concourse. “The technology did not rob me of my usual process, where I can be in the room with an editor and share that energy and immediacy. But I have to be honest, the remote process also taught me that there’s another way: Be clear with what you want, and give the editor or artists their own space to contribute, to do their own interpretation, without you having to be joined at the hip.”
Eventually, the reshoots happened on the Paramount lot during the height of the pandemic. “It was interesting, because we had to learn how to do it. There’s a whole new color system, and you’re constantly being tested. But the good news is that, I’d have a safety meeting in the morning, and I’m looking around at these crews who’ve been working on sets for decades. There’s no one better to take on some challenges than a film crew. They’re going to figure it out.”
Coming 2 America was originally scheduled for theatrical release in August 2020, but as the pandemic dragged on, the date was pushed back to December. Brewer says he saw the writing on the wall before Paramount announced the sale of the film to Amazon. “I was early in my opinion that we’re probably going to go to a streamer.”
The reported budget of Coming 2 America was about $60 million. When Amazon paid $125 million for the rights to the film, it seemed like a decent profit for Paramount, who stood to lose an entire year of theatrical income. In retrospect, it seems like a bargain for Jeff Bezos — and a triumph for Amazon’s marketing team.
“I was all for us being part of the entertainment during this time. By not pushing it to another year, I felt like we were, for a lack of a better term, like a service. Let’s get this movie out to everybody right now. We want to see some old friends. We want to enjoy ourselves. I felt really special, actually, after awhile. The whole cast did. Look, we were disappointed. Of course, we would want it to be in movie theaters, and we want that communal experience to happen where there wasn’t a pandemic and thousands of lives being lost. But here’s where we are now. We hope everybody just stays at home and watches Coming 2 America and has a great time with their family and friends. It’s a feel-good movie, and people need to feel good right now. It felt really bad for a long time; now we need to feel good.”
Coming 2 America is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.
