While there is still no big, new news to report, Variety has confirmed that the film is close to being greenlit at Sony.

According to the trade publication, a script has been approved by producers and production could begin in early 2019.

The film, now under the title Bad Boys For Life,  it has been in development for some time. In 2016, it was announced that the project was pushed to 2018, but it then moved off the schedule. Martin Lawrence even said in an interview last year, “I don’t think we’re going to get one, not the way everything’s turning out. Will is off doing another movie, and I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Sony announced in May that the movie would  be released Martin Luther King weekend 2020 on January 17. Smith is officially on-board while Lawrence, while not confirmed, is still circling the film.

From Jerry Bruckheimer, the directors are Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. Chris Bremner is the latest script writer.

In May of this year, a rumored plot summary surfaced via That Hashtag Show: The film will see Lawrence’s character, Marcus Burnett, working as a private eye after a falling out with Smith’s Mike Lowery, who is going through a midlife crisis as a bachelor who finally wants to mature, all while dealing with a new, young and cocky partner who is loyal to Lowery but that loyalty is not reciprocated, and finds bond with Burnett when he returns to the fray. Lowery and Burnett are brought together again when a lean, mean, skilled, Albanian mercenary with a vendetta puts a death order on Lowery and Burnett for the death of his brother. Now the two must work together once again to bring him down. 

A TV spinoff of the Bad Boys franchise, starring Gabrielle Union (reprising her character from Bad Boys 2) and Jessica Alba, is set to premiere in 2019 on Charter’s Spectrum cable service after initially being developed for NBC.