Is Donald Trump Trying To Get 'Rush Hour 4' Made For Brett Ratner?

President Donald Trump promised to create more jobs if he won a second term in office. And while his presidency may not have yielded the results that many were hoping for, at least he seems to be coming through for one specific alleged dirtbag director.

As Semafor reported, Trump wants the Ellison family to bring back a certain movie franchise, should David Ellison’s Paramount manage to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Surprisingly, the movie franchise doesn’t rhyme with “Floodblort.”

Trump apparently wants the Ellisons to greenlight another Rush Hour sequel.

Back in 2008, Warner Bros. obtained New Line Cinema, the company behind Rush Hour, but they didn’t seem terribly interested in bringing back Detective Carter and Inspector Lee. Nor did anyone else. As we’ve mentioned before, after the studio made the shock move of allowing the sequel to be “licensed elsewhere,” nobody in Hollywood wanted to touch Rush Hour 4. Why? Supposedly because director Brett Ratner was part of the pitch.

Ratner helmed the first three Rush Hour films, but four years after the third movie premiered, he made headlines for torpedoing Eddie Murphy’s Oscar gig with his casual homophobia. Then, in 2017, Ratner faced accusations that he harassed and abused multiple women, including one allegation of rape, which Ratner denied. 

While the disgraced director hasn’t helmed a feature film since the 2014 Dwayne Johnson-starring Hercules, he recently landed his first high-profile gig since the allegations. Ratner produced and directed the upcoming theatrical documentary Melania, all about first lady Melania Trump. If only she made a jacket to express how many of us feel about this movie…

Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for the doc, which Melania Trump executive produced, a move that some industry experts blasted as “absurd.” Other critics called out the payment as an alleged open bribe from the billionaire to the president, and another example of “corporations pandering to Trump." 

Now, after Ratner directed a puff piece about the first lady that seemingly led to a highly profitable payday for all involved, the President might be putting his small thumb on the scale for Ratner’s previously unproducible sequel into production.

To be clear, there’s no evidence that Trump is pushing for a Ratner-helmed Rush Hour sequel specifically, nor that he had a hand in picking the director of Melania. Puck attempted to trace the origin of the doc’s hiring process, noting that Ratner has “deep connections to people who matter in Trumpworld.” 

And Rush Hour producer Arthur Sarkissian also has an in with the Trumps after making the hilariously sycophantic Trump documentary The Man You Don’t Know.

But Ratner and Trump have a professional history that stretches all the way back to 2011’s Tower Heist, which was originally supposed to be called Trump Heist. Even though the title changed, Trump visited the set regularly while Ratner filmed inside Trump Tower.

And Ratner, along with Dean Cain and Kevin Sorbo, was one of the talking head interviewees in the right wing documentary Trump vs Hollywood.

The fact that this Pornhub-video-looking doc still isn’t their most embarrassing IMDb credit says something. Rush Hour 4 is going to be great.