Hollywood history has hundreds of stories where some actor or other was originally going to star in some such movie that went on to be a big hit. Infamously, David Schwimmer was in the running for Agent J in Men in Black which of course went to Will Smith. Smith, in turn, passed on The Matrix<\/a> which went to Keanu Reeves. It\u2019s the way of big budget movies. Eddie Murphy has had his share of those. The actor recently told AP<\/a> (which we saw on Variety<\/a>) there are three big movies that he regrets turning down.<\/p>\n NBC<\/p>\n \u201cGhostbusters, I was supposed to do Ghostbusters<\/a>,\u201d Murphy recalled. \u201cDidn\u2019t do that, and Rush Hour. Didn\u2019t do that. Oh, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Those are my big three \u2018wish I would have done\u2019 movies.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, Ghostbusters we all sort of knew about. Initially, the film was written with Murphy in mind for the role that ultimately went to Ernie Hudson. Had Murphy done the film, the role would have been bigger, Winston would have appeared throughout. But because he turned down Ghostbusters, Murphy got to do Beverly Hills Cop which was *his* movie. Probably the right choice there. Rush Hour would have made for a different movie. Chris Tucker\u2019s manic, high-pitched energy opposite Jackie Chan is a distinctive feature of that franchise. But it\u2019s not hard to see how Murphy would have changed it and still made for a good movie.<\/p>\n The one that blows me away is Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Like, what?! He\u2019d probably have been the Bob Hoskins role, because that\u2019s the only major human role in the movie except for Christopher Lloyd\u2019s Judge Doom and that doesn\u2019t seem likely. What a weird, weird choice that would have been. Murphy himself says he didn\u2019t know what to make of the premise.<\/p>\n \u201cWho Framed Roger Rabbit just sounded ridiculous to me, and I passed on it. And afterwards, I was like, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s fucking amazing.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Gotta love those coulda-woulda-shoulda moments.<\/p>\n Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus<\/a>. You can find his film and TV reviews here<\/a>. Follow him on Letterboxd<\/a>.<\/p>\n The post Eddie Murphy Regrets Turning Down GHOSTBUSTERS, RUSH HOUR<\/a> appeared first on Nerdist<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hollywood history has hundreds of stories where some actor or other was originally going to star in some such movie that went on to be a big hit. Infamously, David Schwimmer was in the running for Agent J in Men in Black which of course went to Will Smith. Smith, in turn, passed on The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2175609,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[26739,305348,397522,346863,306645,394187,307920],"class_list":["post-2175608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-david-schwimmer","tag-eddie-murphy","tag-ernie-hudson","tag-ghostbusters","tag-keanu-reeves","tag-who-framed-roger-rabbit","tag-will-smith"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Eddie-Murphy-Regrets-Turning-Down-GHOSTBUSTERS-RUSH-HOUR.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2175608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2175608"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2175608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2175610,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2175608\/revisions\/2175610"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2175609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2175608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2175608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2175608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n