Beverly Hills Cop was the second studio film director Martin Brest ever made. It wasn’t just the biggest hit of his career; it became the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time and held onto that title for nearly two decades before losing it to The Matrix in 1999. More importantly, after producing a moderate hit in the form of the crime caper Going In Style, the success of Beverly Hills Cop transformed Martin Brest into an A-list director.

Four years later, Martin Brest would do the impossible, capturing lightning in a bottle twice with Midnight Run, a cult classic starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin that many consider one of the absolute best action comedies ever made. For his next trick, Brest helped Al Pacino capture his first-ever Oscar win for his performance in Scent of a Woman, and he followed that up with the melancholic (and epic) Meet Joe Black. No one expected Martin Brest’s next film to be his last, but that’s precisely what happened when his sixth film, Gigli, became one of the most notorious box office disasters ever.

Who Is Martin Brest?

One of the Best Action-Comedy Directors of All Time

Martin Brest was born in the Bronx in New York City in 1951, and he honed his filmmaking skills as a young man by attending New York University’s film school, followed by a program at the American Film Institute, which routinely produced directors of great talent and injected them directly into the Hollywood system.

In 1972, Brest shot a short film titled Hot Dogs for Gauguin, which starred a then-unknown Danny DeVito alongside his wife, Rhea Perlman. The short was so successful (and funny) that it earned air-time during a Jamie Lee Curtis-hosted Saturday Night Live episode aired in 1980. Around that same time, Brest directed his first studio film, Going In Style. This film, which featured George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg as three elderly New Yorkers who want to spend their golden years robbing banks, introduced audiences to Brest’s understated sense of humor.

To be clear, a dark, nebulous cloud never hung over Martin Brest’s creativity. He wasn’t challenging to work with (mostly) or consumed with a desire to make pure art films. He was simply a driven and nuanced filmmaker capable of taking a comedic script and adding some necessary dramatic flourishes, as he was capable of taking a dramatic script and lightening the mood with a series of not-so-serious embellishments.

In 1982, his career hit its first snag when he was fired from the set of the technological thriller WarGames. He had reworked the film’s script (originally called The Genius) and turned it into a much darker thriller. Brest then shot two weeks’ worth of footage before being replaced by Saturday Night Fever director John Badham, who combined some of Brest’s ideas with the lighter touch of the movie’s initial script. Being removed from WarGames didn’t harm Brest’s reputation in Hollywood, but he was concerned enough to ensure that his next film had to be a hit.

How Did Martin Brest Impact Beverly Hills Cop?

He Got the Most Out of the Film’s Star

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer knew that his script for Beverly Hills Cop needed a director capable of handling comedy and drama. That meant he only ever truly wanted one man to helm the picture, and that individual was Martin Brest. Unfortunately, with Martin being so precious about his next project, he turned them down every time Jerry and his producing partner Don Simpson approached him and offered him the job. Still, the two producers remained relentless, and eventually, Brest’s involvement came down to a (literal) coin toss. Bruckheimer and Simpson would leave him alone if the quarter came up tails. If it came up heads, Martin Brest would agree to direct Beverly Hills Cop. The coin came up heads.

With Martin Brest attached to direct Beverly Hills Cop, the movie needed a lead. Initially, that star wasn’t going to be Eddie Murphy. Instead, it was going to be Sylvester Stallone. Once Stallone got his hands on the script and delivered a rewrite, the story became too expensive to make. Two weeks before shooting began, Stallone bowed out, leaving Bruckheimer, Simpson, and Brest just 48 hours (ironically) to convince Eddie Murphy to star in the film. Production was pushed by a month, and Brest got to work on rewriting the script once again.

Martin Brest’s most crucial contribution to Beverly Hills Cop was his complete and utter belief that a young Eddie Murphy could carry the picture. He put his reputation on the line with Paramount Pictures CEO Barry Diller. He encouraged Murphy to push past his tendency to embrace a broader sense of humor and find importance in the film’s dramatic moments, like early on in the movie when Axel Foley is catching up with his soon-to-be-executed friend, Mickey, expressing how much the two men care for one another. It was moments like those that Brest fought hard to protect and then disappeared from the franchise when the series continued without him.

What Happened to Gigli?

A Surrealistic Epic Turned into a Run-of-the-Mill Mobster Picture

Tony Scott was given the directing duties on Beverly Hills Cop II following the remarkable success of his Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simspon-produced film Top Gun. Meanwhile, Martin Brest went on to helm a crime-comedy caper nearly as successful as his last in Midnight Run. He followed that up with the critically and commercially acclaimed Scent of a Woman and only began to slide slightly with the underwhelmingly received Meet Joe Black. That movie didn’t light the box office on fire, but those who saw it appreciated the film’s tone and style. Following that overly dramatic turn, Brest considered a return to the comedy and action genre that had proved so successful for him before with a project named Gigli.

Gigli was Martin Brest’s first original screenplay for a movie he had directed since Going In Style. Having been released from Universal after Meet Joe Black’s disappointing box office, Brest set Gigli up at Revolution Studios, a studio run by former 20th Century Fox and Walt Disney Studios head Joe Roth. Roth agreed to let Brest have the film’s final cut and allowed him to make the picture he wanted—at least, for a time.

Looking at what Gigli eventually became, it’s hard to determine precisely what Martin Brest’s original intentions were for the film. His completed first cut of the movie was reportedly so polarizing that most test audiences despised it (while a few others allegedly loved it). According to sources close to production on the film, the original version of this mobster-set love story starring two of the biggest stars in the world, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez (who were also an item), featured a surrealistic ending that the studio balked at.

After those disastrous test screenings, Revolution Studios demanded that Martin Brest redesign the film into a more mainstream comedy, the type of movie that (they believed) would better suit the mainstream appeal of the film’s two leads. Since Brest had the final cut, Roth couldn’t force him to recut the movie, but he insisted on reshoots. Feeling pressure after seeing the test numbers, Brest agreed to drop the mystical ending and restructure segments of the film. This escalated Gigli’s budget to an amount it was practically guaranteed never to recoup at the box office.

By the end of Gigli’s short-lived box office life, it had only taken in $6 million on an estimated $54 million budget. The reviews of the film were nearly just as vicious as those returns. After Gigli swept the Razzies, it felt like salt poured directly onto Martin Brest’s gaping wound, and the director decided to leave Hollywood behind permanently.

What Happened to Martin Brest After Gigli?

Everyone In Hollywood Lost His Scent

Following Gigli’s release in the summer of 2003, Martin Brest disappeared (quite literally). At no point over the next decade-plus did anyone in Hollywood hear from him. There were no “Produced By” credits, no Q&A sessions at entertainment conventions, and no attempted comeback. Despite having worked with (and earned the respect of) stars like Eddie Murphy, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, and Ben Affleck, Martin Brest was done with Hollywood. Playboy magazine searched for him while making a retrospective piece about his career in 2014 and never found a single workable piece of contact information.

And then, all of a sudden, Martin Brest returned. Well, sort of. In 2023, he responded to a request from Variety to finally take a look back at his career and discuss the major turning points. Touching upon every film he ever made, Brest revealed that while he was grateful for the success and freedom he had throughout much of his career, after how disappointing an experience the making of Gigli was, he grew tired of making films, saying,

“Of all the movies that I’ve worked on, I know them inside and out. I don’t even know what [ Gigli ] looks like, frankly, because of the manner in which it took shape. Even the name… I refer to it as ‘the G movie.’ Probably the less said about it, the better.”

As for whether a comeback is entirely out of the question, Brest informed Variety that he wrote a novel during the pandemic, although he doesn’t plan to publish it. He also began developing a new idea for a film with some interested producers, but Brest believes the movie will probably never be made. Considering Martin Brest’s incredible track record of success, that’s a bigger shame than what became of Gigli.