“What is that velvet?”
“Just let your soul glow!”
“Sexual chocolate!”
“She’s your queen to beeeeeee!”
On the day that the new Coming 2 America, the 2021 sequel now streaming on Amazon, we remember the original classic movie. It’s been 30 years since Prince Akeem (Murphy) traveled from the fictional African nation of Zamunda to Queens, New York, with his loyal sidekick Semmi (Hall) to avoid an arranged marriage and find Akeem’s own beloved queen, Lisa (Shari Headley). In the sequel, Akeem follows his father (James Earl Jones) as the king of the land but doesn’t have a male heir himself – and according to Zamundan law, none of his three daughters can take the crown when it’s time.
The movie Coming To America has created so many quoteables, memes, Halloween outfits, themed parties and spin-off ideas, that it has become the go-to movie that never disappoints no matter how many times it comes on cable.
Released in 1988, by Paramount Pictures in the United States, it was a commercial box-office success, both domestically and worldwide. The film debuted at number one with $21,404,420 from 2,064 screens, for a five-day total of $28,409,497. The film made $128,152,301 in the United States and ended up with a worldwide total of $288,752,301. It was the highest earning film that year for the studio and the third-highest-grossing film at the United States box office.
The 2018 marked its 30th anniversary. Can you believe it’s been 33 years since Eddie Murphy transformed into the Prince of Zamunda, Randy Watson, the old white Jewish guy and so many other unforgettable characters? Well, let’s take a look back at some of the films funniest moments.
The movie was so good and so funny, everyone was talking about doing a sequel, but it took 30 years to do it and now it’s on Amazon.
Speaking to Good Morning America about the legacy of “Coming to America” celebrating it’s anniversary, writers David Sheffield and Barry Blaustein touched on how the sequel finally came about.
“Eddie [Murphy] called us and said, ‘We’re going to do a sequel. We have a notion and an idea,’” he recalled.
“It began with the notion that Eddie’s character Prince Akeem] has to find his son, who can become the king because the country has this tradition that the eldest male [will take the throne],” Sheffield continued. “So it’s Eddie pursuing his long-lost son, who’s an American. That was the basis of it. That was the beginning.”
The film, which will be directed by Jonathan Levine (“Snatched”, “Warm Bodies”), is one both screenwriters resisted doing for decades.
“We had resisted doing a sequel for a long time because we thought it was pretty much a ‘fade to complete,’” Sheffield said. “We thought it was…
… self-contained… Hakeem’s story was complete. He met the woman of his dreams and we didn’t want to mess with that.”
“We’re friends and usually with Eddie it starts with a phone call,” Sheffield said. “[He asks,] ‘Hey want to write this?’ And we say, ‘Great!’”
The duo didn’t say much more than that, but they did confirm that John Amos will be back as Cleo McDowell, the kindly owner of McDonald’s rip-off restaurant McDowells.
“John Amos is in our version,” Blaustein teased. “He’s in Zamunda and he opened up a McDowells.”
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