Ike Barinholtz Reveals the Heartbreaking Real Reason Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key’s ‘Police Academy’ Reboot Got Shelved

For more than two decades, New Line Cinema has tried to bring ‘Police Academy’ back to the big screen, and almost as many attempts have quietly fallen apart. Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key were working on a new ‘Police Academy’ film, and New Line Cinema had been trying to develop another installment of the franchise for over 20 years. It is a franchise that fans have wanted revived for years, yet nothing ever seemed to stick.

Peele and Key actually joined the project back in 2012, though development updates were few and far between after that. The plan had them producing and starring in a rebooted, R rated version of the 1984 comedy, written by Ike Barinholtz and his writing partner David Stassen for New Line Cinema. Given the duo’s chemistry on ‘Mad TV’ and their own sketch series, the idea of them anchoring a modernized ‘Police Academy’ had real comedic potential on paper.

That potential never made it to a screen. On the June 17 episode of his podcast ‘Funny You Ask,’ Barinholtz told guest Joel McHale the story of an awkward pitch meeting tied to the rewrite. Barinholtz revealed that he and Stassen were rewriting the script for ‘Police Academy,’ but after a police officer killed Michael Brown in 2014, everyone involved realized it was no longer a good idea to make a comedy about cops, even after the film had spent roughly 12 years in development.

Barinholtz did not soften the moment when he described it on the show. As we were developing the film, Mike Brown got shot, and all of a sudden, 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 said during his conversation, according to a report from Variety. The studio, he explained, simply could not ignore how badly the tone would clash with the national mood.

The original ‘Police Academy,’ released in 1984, starred Steve Guttenberg, Kim Cattrall and Bubba Smith, and it became a major box office success that spawned six sequels, a live action television series and an animated series. That legacy is part of why New Line kept circling back to the property even decades later. Attempts to revive the franchise have repeatedly stalled since 2003.

The timing made the cancellation feel almost inevitable. Just days after Brown’s death, the buddy cop comedy ‘Let’s Be Cops,’ starring Damon Wayans Jr. and Jake Johnson, opened to intense criticism. Seeing that backlash play out in real time only confirmed how risky a comedic cop project looked in that exact moment.

Barinholtz is now starring in the Apple TV Plus showbiz satire ‘The Studio,’ while Peele continues developing his next secret feature film and Key is working on the ‘Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion’ sequel. None of them have publicly suggested the ‘Police Academy’ rewrite could ever be revived.

Knowing how close Key and Peele came to suiting up as cops in a modern ‘Police Academy,’ would you have wanted to see that version reach theaters, or does this feel like a reboot that was always better left unmade?