Whether he was enthusiastically weighing in on Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart’s breakup or waxing nostalgic for Gone with the Wind and Sunset Boulevard, Donald Trump has long seemed more passionate about movies than about policy. Yet aside from remaking the Kennedy Center in his own image and appointing Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight, and Mel Gibson as his “special ambassadors to Hollywood,” Trump’s actual influence on which movies get made has been indirect at best. That is, until now.
A few days ago, Semafor reported that Trump was trying to use his bully pulpit to get some of his favored movie projects greenlit. Chief among them? A revival of Paramount Pictures’ Rush Hour franchise, a series of mismatched-buddy-cop films starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, whose first three installments grossed more than $850 million between 1998 and 2007.
A source “directly familiar with the conversations” told Semafor that the President had “personally pressed” Skydance Media’s David Ellison to greenlight a fourth Rush Hour movie. Skydance, you may remember, recently merged with Paramount Pictures, in a deal that Trump’s FCC approved not long after Paramount settled a legal fight with Trump over a 60 Minutes interview by paying the President $16 million, an arrangement that many people, including some House Democrats, have called “a bribe.”
Today brought word, courtesy of Hollywood insider Matt Belloni, that Trump’s prodding was actually successful, and Paramount is actually moving forward with Rush Hour 4. Per Belloni’s report, it sounds like Brett Ratner will be back to direct, with producer Tarak Ben Ammar lining up financing. At long last, it seems we can all agree: today is the day Donald Trump truly became president.
The obvious question this move raises is, of all the movies, why Rush Hour?
Trump has an obvious and well known soft spot for old Hollywood glamour and Broadway musicals (he has said his favorite song is “Cats,” from the musical Cats, though the song is actually called “Memories”). He’s also famously fond of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Bloodsport. In a lore-defining 1997 New Yorker profile by Marc Singer, Trump screens that “incredible, fantastic movie” on his personal airplane, instructing his son Eric to fast-forward through the exposition in order to get to the fight scenes faster. The data point that Trump likes martial arts movies gets us a little closer to explaining why Rush Hour was a priority for him, though the Rush Hour films are arguably among the least martial arts-y of the Jackie Chan canon (the Jackie Chanon, if you will).
The most obvious factor at work here is probably the Brett Ratner angle. Ratner directed all three Rush Hour movies at the arguable peak of his career, which stalled out in the late 20-teens after he was accused of sexual misconduct by six women in a 2017 LA Times report. Ratner was reported to have emigrated to Israel by 2023, but received an unlikely second act courtesy of Trumpworld; he spent months following Melania Trump around for a documentary, Melania, which hits theaters in January, and whose producers include the First Lady herself.
If ever there was a poster boy for the #MeToo-to-Trump-Two post-cancellation pipeline, it’s Brett Ratner. Trump has made not firing underlings—even the ones in the midst of escalating and increasingly stupid scandals (Hegseth, Kash Patel)—part of his raison d’etre in his second term. Helping to affirm that Brett Ratner is uncancellable seems at least tangentially of a piece with that. Even the broad, lightly problematic racial humor of Rush Hour seems mostly in line with the anti-cancel culture tenor of Trump’s second term, albeit in an extremely low-stakes way.
In other ways, the politics of rebooting Rush Hour are more complicated. For one thing, it seems odd for famous China hawk Donald Trump (Trump enunciating “Chiiina” echoes in my head as I type this) to back the franchise that made a Stateside star out of Jackie Chan, who’s lost fans in his native Hong Kong for his increasingly enthusiastic support of the Beijing regime. While cozying up to the Chinese government is pretty un-Trumpian, choosing material stability over your old friends and growing increasingly authoritarian with age? Very Trumpy.
Chris Tucker, meanwhile, has only appeared in three movies since Rush Hour, but did famously show up in the Jeffrey Epstein flight logs—apparently as part of a humanitarian trip to Africa that also included Kevin Spacey, Michael Jackson, and Bill Clinton. The actor-comedian always denied Katt Williams’ suggestion that Tucker went to Epstein’s island (and was never otherwise credibly accused of doing so, so far as we can tell), but it still seems like an association Trump might want to avoid, in light of his coalition increasingly fracturing over the issue (e.g., the resignation of Marjorie Taylor-Greene.)
But if there’s one thing the entire Epstein debacle—and Trump’s decision to whip his fan base into a frenzy over a scandal that he himself seems to have been consistently near the center of—makes clear, it’s that it’s usually a mistake to read too deeply into any one decision that Donald Trump makes, or to assume that he’s been playing any kind of ten-dimensional chess. Probably the most obvious explanation for Trump bringing up Rush Hour is the most correct one: Ratner, the guy who made the Rush Hour movies, was around a lot, and thus the Rush Hour movies managed to lodge themselves inside Trump’s waffle brain alongside “late great Hannibal Lecter” and the word “groceries.”
It’s hard to imagine Trump thinking about Rush Hour in terms of China, Epstein, or cancel culture. It’s much easier to imagine them as exactly the kind of light, stupid movies that a kind-of-stupid guy like Donald Trump would remember fondly, and go on an extended riff about that he may or may not even remember the next day. Trump is famous for agreeing with whoever the last guy he talked to was. If he’s been hanging out with Brett Ratner and talking to David Ellison, it’s not hard to imagine him setting this reboot in motion just by free-associating another classic riff:
“The Rush Hour movies, remember those? Tremendous movies, Rush Hour. Why don’t we have movies like Rush Hour anymore? They say you can’t make movies like Rush Hour anymore. Folks, we’re bringing ‘em back! I always loved the Rush Hour. Fantastic. ‘Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?’ I sat next to Chris Tucker at Phantom of the Opera on Broadway once…”