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When I first heard that Donald Trump had asked Larry Ellison to make Rush Hour 4 happen for canceled filmmaker Brett Ratner, I imagined a conversation that went something like this:

Trump: Hey, you should make Rush Hour 4 with Brett Ratner. He’s done a tremendous job on the Melania movie.

Ellison: Sure, I’ll mention it to David.

And that would have been the end of it. Because making Rush Hour 4 is, in the view of many longtime Hollywood players, a terrible idea. And it’s not just that Ratner became toxic in 2017, after six women accused him of sexual harassment and misconduct. (At the time Ratner, through his attorney, “categorically disputed” their accounts.) Indeed, Ratner has boasted, even during his wilderness-wandering era, that Rush Hour 4 was going to be his next project. But the thing had been pitched all over town, to no avail. One of the many executives who passed on the movie called it “a geriatric money play”—and not the kind that results in a box office bonanza for the studio.

Rush Hour 4 has become the kind of property that Hollywood tries to foist off on unwary outsiders—like when producer Elie Samaha famously convinced German investors to finance John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth. The Rush Hour franchise was birthed at Warners’ New Line division, so the studio had the rights to do a fourth installment, but you didn’t see anyone there jump at that opportunity. Eventually Toby Emmerich, then head of the film studio, let producer Arthur Sarkissian shop it to other bidders, though Warners loaded any potential project with onerous terms. It would be licensed for one picture only and the studio would retain a piece of first-dollar gross, among other terms—all of which didn’t help the picture find a distributor. Neither did the prospect of doing business with Ratner.

Even Paramount’s film executives were unwilling to take on the film—until now. Leadership has been trying to inoculate the studio from criticism by saying it will only distribute the movie. I’m told by a source with knowledge of the situation that some of the film’s breathtaking $100 million production budget will come from Saudi Arabia, which is also backing the Ellisons’ bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

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Just letting the production rent the studio’s distribution system—in what appears to be yet another bid to maintain Trump’s support for the Ellisons’ pursuit of Warners—might not inflict much financial pain. But it’s still unclear whether Paramount will be on the hook for marketing, and as the studio has agreed to release the film worldwide, that could easily cost another $100 million—or more.

One of the big mysteries here is why Trump went to bat for Ratner at all. Maybe he loved Rush Hour, or maybe he’s thrilled with the Melania documentary that Ratner shot with $40 million of Amazon’s money (speaking of outlandish prices). Also, Sarkissian, the producer who has waited so long for a chance to launch another Rush Hour, just produced a pro-Trump documentary called The Man You Don’t Know. One longtime producer, who is merely observing from the sidelines, said Trump’s support is a tribute to Ratner’s ability to ingratiate himself with powerful people. True, the filmmaker has not only managed to make friends with oligarchs but partnered for a time with Australian billionaire James Packer and then with Steven Mnuchin, who went on to serve as Treasury secretary in the first Trump administration.

But could it really just be Ratner’s charm? (And I should note that not everyone finds him charming. Writer Will Landman, a former production intern on Saturday Night Live, tweeted on November 25: “Fun Fact: Brett Ratner is one of the biggest pieces of shit I’ve met while working on SNL.”) Trump doesn’t seem to do favors without expecting something in return. After Melania Trump announced her Muse Films production company, I wondered if she might have a role in Ratner’s project. I texted Brett to ask, mentioning what I’d heard about the budget and the Saudi financing arranged through longtime producer Tarak Ben Ammar. This was his answer: “Muse Films is absolutely not involved in Rush Hour 4. What a ridiculous assumption that Muse Films is producing. Tarak is the producer and financier and I am not privy to the details of his conversations. The budget is over 100m. Happy Holidays.”

The Tunisian-French Ben Ammar, 76, is a veteran player in the international market. (He also served on The Weinstein Co.’s board and just received a four-year suspended sentence in France for filing a fraudulent bankruptcy, which he is appealing.) He responded to my inquiry about the project by text, saying, “Unfortunately I don’t discuss deals while in progress.”

Is Ratner really positioned for a comeback? And a comeback from what? Who even is Brett Ratner? That’s a question I’ve had long before the allegations against him. To say he’s a filmmaker seems too simple. Sure, he directed X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006 and Tower Heist in 2011. His last feature as a director was 2014’s Hercules, with Dwayne Johnson, which grossed $243 million worldwide.

But before the 2017 allegations, Ratner had become known more as a financing producer and a very social animal. Ratpac Entertainment, his production company, was settled in Frank Sinatra’s old offices on the Warners lot. He threw parties at his house at which the guests were “mostly male executives and producers and wannabe actresses,” one attendee told me. “And,” this person said, “he made introductions.”

He was also involved in two of the biggest Hollywood sex scandals of the 2010s. In 2012, he met aspiring British actress Charlotte Kirk, then 19, at Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood. Then in his early 40s, Ratner wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to help Kirk get a visa to work as an actress. Though she was a total unknown, Ratner said Kirk was “an outstanding actress with remarkable talent” who possessed “the unique ability to deliver each of her lines seamlessly.” (Ratner has denied Kirk’s later allegation that he demanded sexual favors in exchange for writing the letter.)

That same year, Kirk began an affair with Ron Meyer, then vice chairman of NBCUniversal. The following year, Packer, Ratner’s producing partner at the time, set Kirk up for a late-night encounter with then-Warners chairman Kevin Tsujihara at the Hotel Bel-Air. (Packer had already burned through his own affair with Kirk.) Subsequently, Kirk repeatedly implored Meyer, Tsujihara, and Ratner to help her book roles. Both studio executives wound up losing their jobs when their conduct came to light.

Following the 2017 allegations against him, Ratner largely slipped off of Hollywood’s radar. That changed last January, when news began circulating of a documentary about the first lady’s return to the White House. As I reported earlier this year, a source involved in the bidding for the project told me that Ratner had been living at Mar-a-Lago as Melania’s guest without having met her. (Ratner did not respond to a request for comment at the time.) It’s unclear why Melania Trump put her faith in Ratner, but perhaps more will be revealed when the doc lands on Amazon in January.

And now, finally, Ratner has lined up a follow-up to that project—though the laws of the business mean that a movie can always fall apart. Ratner has told studio executives that Jackie Chan, now 71, and Chris Tucker, whose last leading movie role was Rush Hour 3 in 2007, are ready to make Rush Hour 4. (I couldn’t reach reps for either to confirm those details.) It’s unclear who else might want to join the cast, but these are lean times and people do like to eat.

It remains to be seen whether Ratner, now 56, will be a more disciplined director than he was in the previous Rush Hour era. One producer who worked with him told me that “he’s an infant” who was “more focused on his cellphone than on what was going into the camera.” A studio executive who has also worked with Ratner said, “There have certainly been moments on set where that would be a fair statement. But regardless of what you believe or know about his behavior, to entirely dismiss the slate of films he’s created would be an injustice. He’s not making Kurosawa movies, but if you look at the list, he did a good job of making audience-satisfying movies.”

This exec is one of the few who thinks the very long-delayed fourth Rush Hour installment could actually work, though maybe not so much with that price tag. “There are certain franchises that are dead and gone and finished, but I think the passage of a significant amount of time between installments does change the calculus,” he argued. The key is whether “there’s reason to believe people still have fond feelings about characters. ‘Does the global audience care?’ is a different question.”

I also checked in with an insider at WME, which had dropped Ratner in the #MeToo era. Would the agency take him back? “I think that would be a bridge too far, to represent Brett Ratner,” this person said. After all, “He’s not Jim Cameron. And why would anyone sign him right now? You’re not going to be commissioning this project.” But then came the caveat: “You never say never in this environment that we’re in.”

Thanks, Kim. Julia Alexander will be here tomorrow, and I’ll be back on Thursday.

Matt

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