Next month, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence will reprise their roles as Mike and Marcus in Bad Boys: Ride or Die. It will be the fourth film in the franchise and the latest entry in the series since the finale of the spin-off show LA’s Finest in late 2020. If you want to find out where to watch every Bad Boys movie, check out our list below.
The first Bad Boys movie premiered in 1995, and on top of being a blockbuster hit for Smith and Lawrence, it also served as the breakout role for actress Téa Leoni. In the film, Smith and Lawrence play two police detectives in Miami who are trying to find a massive cache of heroin that’s been stolen from the department’s evidence locker. Things get even more complicated when they’re forced to provide protection for a woman who witnessed a mob hit. The movie grossed almost $66 million in North America alone, making it a bona fide hit.
Thanks to the home rental market, the film continued to be popular, and in 2003 it received a sequel: Bad Boys 2. This time around, Smith and Lawrence were joined by more famous faces like Gabrielle Union and Michael Shannon. In the film, Mike and Marcus are investigating a drug trafficking ring and Mike is secretly seeing Marcus’ younger sister Syd (Union). But neither of the guys know that Syd is actually an undercover agent for the DEA. The dynamic between the three stars really helped keep the sequel feeling fresh and the movie became a smash hit, grossing more than $273 million at the box office.
The franchise then went dormant for almost 20 years, returning in 2019 with the spin-off series LA’s Finest. In the show, Union reprises her role as Syd and is joined by Jessica Alba who plays her partner at the LAPD. Sadly, the show premiered as a Spectrum Original back when the cable company was attempting to create original content. With hardly anyone knowing about the service or what Spectrum was, the show suffered from poor viewership. Just three years later, Spectrum announced it wouldn’t produce more shows after its handful of original series all performed poorly. The good news is that LA’s Finest has been given a second life on other streaming services.
In 2020, Bad Boys finally returned for a third film with Bad Boys for Life. Mike and Marcus return and encounter a vengeful enemy from their past who is hellbent on avenging his father (who was sent to prison after being caught by the duo). Released in January 2020, Bad Boys for Life was one of the only major blockbusters to be released in 2020 before the COVID pandemic shut down theaters around the world. The movie continued performing well in cinemas even through the weekend of March 7-8, just a few days before lockdown began. Still, despite COVID, Bad Boys for Life remains the highest-grossing film in the franchise, earning an impressive $426 million.
If you’re getting excited for Bad Boys: Ride or Die, find out where you can stream the entire Bad Boys franchise using our guide below.
