Well over a decade ago, it was announced that Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele were developing a reboot of Police Academy with the intention of starring in it, but then… the project fell apart, and we never heard about it again. So, what happened?

Why Key & Peele’s Police Academy Reboot Was Scrapped

Ike Barinholtz, who starred alongside Key and Peele on Mad TV, was brought in to rewrite the script for the Police Academy reboot. He revealed on his Funny You Ask podcast that it got off to a bad start when the franchise creator insisted on bringing back original cast members… several of whom had already died.

“I can probably tell the story now. Years ago, my partner and I got hired to rewrite Police Academy for New Line Cinema,” Barinholtz explained. “I don’t even know if he’s still alive, we might have to cut this—but the guy who created the original Police Academy came with the deal. So, they said to us, ‘We want you guys to write it and make it dirty, rated R, modern. He’ll be at some of the meetings but we don’t have to listen to him.’“

Barinholtz continued, “All he wanted to do was give us notes like, ‘We would never do that in the first movie. No, no, no, Mahoney would never say that.’ And he was adamant that we would have the original cast in the movie, he wanted them to have big parts and stuff. So when we’re doing the pitch, my partner was like, ‘So we have this scene and that’s when we see all the original cast. We see Hightower, we see Tackleberry, we have…’ — he’s just naming all dead people. And I was like…he didn’t even do research to find out who’s still alive in the cast. Needless to say… he was not happy.“

For the record, Bubba Smith, who played Hightower, died in 2011, while David Grad, who played Tackleberry, died in 2001.

But what really scrapped the project was the 2014 death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. His death launched more than a week of protests and a grand jury hearing.

“But more importantly, as we were developing the film, Mike Brown got shot,” Barinholtz said. “And we were making the movie for Key and Peele, and all of a sudden, people were like, ‘We’re not making a cop comedy right now where we’re having these two hilarious Black actors play police officers.’ Sorry, never happened.“

There has been some chatter about the reboot continuing, with Steve Guttenberg saying, “I suspect you haven’t seen the last of my Mahoney,” but no real movement.