‘Coming 2 America” was supposed to be this big Christmas release movie this year, primed to be one of the top grossing films of the holiday season.
But COVID-19 came along and forced Paramount Pictures to shift plans. It sold the film to Amazon Prime, which is releasing the film March 5, 2021, instead. The long-awaited sequel to the 1988 massive comedic hit “Coming to America” remains a hot commodity, in part because the original is so beloved three decades later and the primary actors are still alive and well.
A few days ago, Paramount and Amazon released the first photos from the film, which was shot largely in metro Atlanta last year. (Atlanta masquerades as modern-day New York City.)
On Tuesday, they revealed the first 90-second movie trailer, featuring many familiar faces and Murphy again playing Saul and Clarence in the featured barbershop in the ‘80s movie from the same barbershop from the original film.
The trailer, which generated 1.8 million page views on YouTube in its first 10 hours, does not really delve beyond what was described in the plot lines Paramount initially publicized.
More than three decades have passed and a dying King Jaffe Joffer (James Earl Jones) has passed the crown of Zamunda to his son Akeem (Eddie Murphy). But Joffer also informs Akeem that he has a long-lost son, Lavell (Jermaine Fowler), back in New York. Lavell is supposed to be the male heir since, in Zamunda, females still can’t run the show. (Akeem has a daughter with Lisa McDowell, played again by Shari Headley.)
Apparently, Akeem had a fling at some point in the late 1980s, information not divulged in the original film.
So Akeem and his reluctant sidekick Semmi (Arsenio Hall) return to Queens, New York, where they must inform Lavell of the news and convince him that he must fulfill his royal destiny. Other big names that pop up in the sequel are Wesley Snipes and Tracy Morgan.
The trailer features both Murphy and Hall resurrecting some other characters they played in the original movie including Murphy’s unctuous Randy Watson, the singer nicknamed “Sexual Chocolate.” Hall again plays Rev. Brown and Morris in the barbershop.
In said barbershop, the regulars roast Akeem and Semmi when they return: “Hey, it’s Kunta Kinte and ebola!” “The famine and “Blood Diamond,” and “Nelson Mandela and Winnie!”
When a younger customer throws in “Those hungry babies with the flies on their face,” the others harangue him for going over the line and being “politically incorrect.”
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