'Bad Boys For Life' Will Have Multiple Villains

"What becomes of Bad Boys when they're not boys anymore?" is a question writer-director Joe Carnahan (The Grey) wants to ask with Bad Boys for Life. Carnahan's sequel was originally scheduled to open in theaters next summer, but Sony pushed the release date back, giving the director more time to polish the script. Carnahan is still hard at work on the script, and thankfully he's still sharing details about it.

Below, learn more about the Bad Boys 3 villains.

The Bad Boys films aren't known for great villains. Bad Boys II had a memorable antagonist with actor Jordi Mollá, who played an unhinged, coked out drug lord, but the Bad Boys movies have far more fun with the heroes than the villains. Maybe that'll change with Bad Boys for Life because Carnahan has what he believes is a very cool group of villains (via Collider):

It wasn't challenging [coming up with the antagonist]. It should've been. You've got all these years in the game, and you've made all these enemies, you've accumulated all this, so in that respect, it would be easy. But I don't wanna say anything else because I don't wanna ruin the delicacy of who our antagonist is, because I think it's very cool. It's not one person. It's a multi-headed hydra, I'll say that. It works beautifully.

Carnahan went on to say the sequel will show how the past 15 years have changed Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence). There's one change we probably shouldn't expect from this Bad Boys film, though, and it comes down to its rating. The director said "we're making a Bad Boys film, and that's an R-rated movie":

I think it's gonna be R. I don't think we're trying to make a PG-13 version of Bad Boys. We haven't discussed the rating, but both the other films were R-rated; Deadpool made $800 million globally and was an R-rated film, the new Wolverine is R-rated. I think these things don't factor it, my theory is people gravitate more toward R-rated films than PG-13, I think the PG-13 thing is betwixt and between now. It's not fundamentally rooted in any metric where you can go, 'Okay, we can prove that this had success because it was PG-13.' Look at the Matrix trilogy, that was wildly successful and they were all R-rated films. Unless things change, I think we're making a Bad Boys film, and that's an R-rated movie.

A part of the Bad Boys series' appeal is the R-rating, which Michael Bay took full advantage of on Bad Boys II – a movie I can't imagine watching on basic cable. A PG-13 Bad Boys movie doesn't sound like a Bad Boys movie at all, so it's great to learn Carnahan and all involved aren't trying to turn this series into something it's not all these years later, at least when it comes to the sequel's rating.

Bad Boys for Life opens in theaters January 12th, 2018.