How to make a new “Beverly Hills Cop” movie? It’s a question that has long vexed Hollywood. Brett Ratner tried for years to crack the case, though, judging from a 2010 Empire magazine interview, it’s fair to wonder how much progress he ever made. “Like, where do we start?” he wondered.

Like, where, indeed? Among the obstacles puzzling those who attempted to revive the franchise: Is Axel retired? Is he in Beverly Hills? Is he on vacation? Does Judge Reinhold reprise his role as Billy Rosewood?

In hindsight, this all seems unnecessarily complicated. From the moment the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films lightning bolt logo comes on the screen in Netflix’s “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F” (streaming July 3), followed by the wailing sax riff of “The Heat Is On,” you realize that everyone involved understood the assignment. The solution to creating a new “Beverly Hills Cop” movie was to simply make the first one all over again.

“Beverly Hills Cop” came out 40 years ago, an anniversary that will alarm the segment of moviegoers who remember seeing it in theaters, and perhaps astound some just now realizing that Murphy was only 23 when he made it. The movie topped the box office 13 weeks running, selling 67 million tickets and, adjusted for inflation, still stands as the highest-grossing R-rated film of all-time. Coming on the heels of his work on “Saturday Night Live,” “48 Hrs.” and “Trading Places,” it certified Murphy as a movie star.

You had to be there. And if you weren’t (but especially if you were), “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F” has been designed to function as a carefully calibrated time machine to take you back to the days when synth pop ruled the airwaves, you could disable a car by putting a banana in its tailpipe and a suite at a swanky Beverly Hills hotel went for $235 a night. (The price, we learn in “Axel F,” has gone up considerably.)

The formula for making a “Beverly Hills Cop” movie goes like this: You start in Detroit, Axel’s hometown, and spend a good chunk of time and money on a chase involving cars and trucks and, in the case of “Axel F,” a snow plow. Axel is operating outside the police rule book, and when this opening scene is over, after a great deal of mayhem and destruction, his shouting boss lets him know that this time, he has really gone too far. And he’d better not do anything like that ever again! (This time it’s Paul Reiser reading him the riot act.)

But the reprimand doesn’t really register because Axel was right. He’s always right. In fact, he’s never more right than when everyone tells him he’s wrong. That’s part of the character’s appeal.

Then something happens that necessitates a trip to L.A., specifically the 90210. In “Axel F,” it’s a call from Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), still lovable and now in danger because he’s close to learning the truth about a police cover-up. And Billy’s not the only one in peril. Axel’s estranged daughter, Jane (Taylour Paige), is entangled in this mess too, thanks to her job as a criminal defense attorney.

Stakes established, Axel heads to Beverly Hills, where he shrewdly talks his way out of trouble, shares a scene with Bronson Pinchot’s excessively accented Serge, teaches the local authorities a thing or two about police work and, on occasion, demonstrates a sly understanding of racial relations in America. (Told not to reach for his ID by a police officer in “Axel F,” Axel replies, “I’ve been a cop for 30 years. I’ve been Black a whole lot longer. Trust me. I know better.”)

Then there’s a final showdown, showcasing the need to remove your sunglasses while operating a submachine gun, a little more bopping around to Harold Faltermeyer’s synth-pop ditty “Axel F,” the equivalent of a group hug between Murphy, Reinhold and John Ashton (returning as Det. Taggart, Billy’s partner and cranky BFF) and roll credits.

You might not remember this, but the first “Beverly Hills Cop” movie earned an Oscar nomination for original screenplay. Were voters aware that Murphy improvised most of his dialogue to the point that his co-stars could not keep from breaking? Maybe this was a hat tip. Murphy was that good.

You also might not know that there was a third “Beverly Hills Cop” movie, the 1994 entry Murphy has called “garbage.” One of the best lines in “Axel F” comes when Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a newcomer to the franchise playing a Beverly Hills police detective, leafs through Axel’s file and says, “And then, ’94. Not your finest hour.” The first two movies, along with “Axel F,” are streaming on Netflix. The third is not.

Promoting “Axel F,” director Mark Molloy is advertising the fact that he gave Murphy free rein to improvise. (Three writers — Will Beall, Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten — share screenplay credit. Props to whoever came up with the “not your finest hour” line.) Murphy is effective, even if the tone has shifted from a brash swagger to nostalgic cheer. The heat is gone.

But you knew that. Murphy is content to act his age, and the movie spends some time focusing on Axel’s attempts to reconnect with his daughter, a woman as headstrong as her father. And it’s hard to validate feelings when they’re drowned out by machine gun fire.

While it’s easy to view “Axel F” as a calculated cash grab, it’s clear that Murphy possesses an affection for the title character. From the get-go, Murphy’s portrayal hinged on Axel’s ability to warmly connect with everyone he meets. Even the villains like him. As Axel drives his blue Chevy Nova through the streets of Detroit during the new film’s opening credits, the city’s residents smile and wave (and sometimes flip him off) when he cruises by. They’re happy to see him. And so are we.

Charm sets the film apart

“Despicable Me 4” isn’t amazing by any means and probably won’t be in conversation for Best Animated Film at the Oscars, but, like “Rise of Gru,” what sets it apart from any other run-of-the-mill animated film is the charm of the franchise. The reason people continue to rush to the theaters to see these films is their consistency. No matter if it’s a spinoff or a direct sequel, you know walking into a “Despicable Me” film what you’re going to get, and that’s perfectly fine because you’ll still have a good time.

The new additions of Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell) and Poppie (Joey King) are fine. They don’t get much setup and are just thrown at you as new characters, which is fine but very forgettable. The standouts, of course, are the Minions, as well as the addition of Gru Jr. The combination of the two was probably the best part of the whole film. I could’ve watched a 90-minute film of just that.

Horror filmmaker Ti West steps out of the blackness behind the Bates Motel hours after the last tourist tram has made it to safety. Behind him looms the “Psycho” house where Mrs. Bates lurked in the window monitoring the movements of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane — a shot West references in his 2022 slasher “X,” set in 1979, about an elderly farm wife named Pearl who becomes murderously inflamed by a troupe of adult actors shooting a skin flick in her barn. Pearl, an aspiring performer herself, got her own movie the following year in West’s eponymous prequel that rewinds to 1918, when the psychotic failed starlet fed her rival to an alligator named Theda Bara.

Now, West is releasing the third chiller in the series, “MaXXXine,” which finds Maxine Minx, the sole survivor of the first film’s “Texas porn star massacre,” hellbent on becoming a legitimate movie star in 1980s Los Angeles. After six years of sex work, Maxine, played ferociously by Mia Goth, has finally landed her first mainstream role in a sequel called “The Puritan 2.” But her past is still in pursuit, with one chase scene sending Maxine fleeing for her life across the Universal Studios backlot, through the Old West facades to the New York stoops, eventually scampering up the jagged “Psycho” stairs right behind him.

“It’s a weird thing to point a camera at if you’re not making ‘Psycho,’” says West, 43, as he heads farther into the darkness, lighted only by a handful of eerie red lanterns. He calls his trilogy “movie-flavored movies” — artifice and dreams are the top notes. “X” is about scrappy strivers trying to break into the business; “Pearl,” about the dangers of buying into the fantasies onscreen. “MaXXXine,” the highest-profile film of West’s career, wrestles with accepting that Hollywood isn’t quite what one hopes.

“He was ready to deal with this kind of scale, and it’s definitely something he was hungry for,” Goth says, chiming in over Zoom. In addition to playing multiple roles across this mini-franchise, Goth co-wrote “Pearl” and executive-produced the last two films. “We just kind of manifested it,” she continues, “built this entire trilogy into existence. And it’s been incredible to see it unfold.”

West, however, tends to be scrupulously anti-hype. “It is not lost on me that there is a meta thing happening with these movies and me and Mia, and that’s gratifying and strange,” he says. “And it’s also something that we’ve never taken any time to stop and talk about. We were too busy making movies.”

While the marketing team at A24 is all in on “MaXXXine” — “I’ve never had a billboard before,” the director beams — West has been a legitimate filmmaker for well over a decade. His resume of well-regarded independent movies includes the 2016 cowboy vengeance drama “In a Valley of Violence” with Ethan Hawke and John Travolta, plus a string of festival hits like 2009’s “The House of the Devil,” which disposed of a pre-celeb Greta Gerwig early on in a marvelously nasty Hitchcock-esque shock.

“It hasn’t lost its mystique,” West says of the “Psycho” house, a “MaXXXine” location. “Even tonight it’s still like: What a rare opportunity to actually walk up the steps.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

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Still, he’s come a long way since his first trip to the Bates Motel. When he was in middle school, he and his family vacationed at Universal Studios Florida, which had just wrapped “Psycho IV” on its own copy of the set. As a promotional tie-in, the park launched an attraction that taught fans the camera tricks behind the famous shower scene. One volunteer got to brandish a rubber knife and learn how to stab a Marion Crane scream-a-like. West wasn’t chosen, but he went back home with a pair of Bates Motel souvenir slippers and an appreciation for film craft.

“Now that’s all gone, and it’s a Shrek ride or something,” he shrugs. “No offense to Shrek.”

West spent the rest of his youth in Wilmington, Del., renting five VHS tapes for $5 on Fridays at his local video store. One weekend, he rented “Habit,” a grungy but brilliant microbudget vampire flick made by filmmaker Larry Fessenden. Shortly after, he moved to New York and took a film class taught by director Kelly Reichardt, who’d played a cameo in the film. Reichardt introduced the two and Fessenden became West’s mentor, eventually producing his debut feature, “The Roost,” shot exactly 20 years ago with more moxie than money.

“Apparently, now we’re mentioned on the tour,” West adds of his upgraded circumstances, in mild disbelief. “I feel a little bit like I’ve made it.” Filming on the lot took Herculean coordination. Some theme-park trams were rerouted, others couldn’t be. Shots were hastily filmed in the gaps between gawkers. Once, the timing went awry and a few dozen tourists interrupted a take. Cameras out, the visitors snapped away at Goth and Elizabeth Debicki like they were tigers in a zoo.

West and his dog, Molly, visit Hollywood Forever Cemetery, one of the filming locations for “MaXXXine.”

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

If West is now a Hollywood animal himself, the only affectation he’s adopted is a tiny 12-pound black dog named Molly who accompanies him everywhere. During this night stroll, she’s quietly tucked into a sling around his hips. On set, Molly had her own chair that read “Executive Paw-ducer.” The next morning, as our personal tour of “MaXXXine’s” locations continues, she’s wearing an A24-branded leash and trying to sneak sips of West’s iced oat-milk latte.

Today, he and Molly and a photographer are piled into an SUV that stops at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the location where two of the film’s detectives, played by Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale, make a grisly discovery. (Molly insists on relieving herself in a spot without any graves — she’s a professional.) The fictional corpses planted here by the production were mutilated in the manner of Richard Ramirez, popularly known as the Night Stalker, the real-life L.A. serial killer who murdered at least 13 people during the ’80s. That paranoia is the film’s terrifying backdrop, just as the Spanish flu pandemic leaves scars on “Pearl.”

But this isn’t a Night Stalker story — there’s already half a dozen of those. “MaXXXine,” like West’s “The House of the Devil” before it, vibrates with the tension of Reagan-era Satanic panic, a moment of media-hyped conspiracy that manages to feel both old-fashioned and contemporary.

“When I was growing up, you could get arrested for skateboarding, and now it’s going to be in the Olympics,” West says. But grandstanding moralists stay the same, even if A24 had to hire faux protesters to wave placards that read, “Honor God, End Smut.”

“I’m hopeful that this October there are people that are going to dress up as her from all three movies,” West says of Goth’s many incarnations, including “MaXXXine,” pictured. “That’ll be really strange.”

(A24)

West puts a lot of emphasis on making the past look real, not cartoonish. No ridiculous zebra prints, no suburban mall pastels. Authenticity is baked into everything, from the camera techniques and practical effects to Maxine’s fried split ends.

The “MaXXXine” review embargo has just broken as our car arrives at Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue, but West barely glances at his phone. “It’ll be the appropriate mixture of ‘best movie of the three,’ ‘worst movie ever,’” he says calmly. So far, the critics like it, but West seems more fulfilled by the act of making, promoting and releasing three films in four years with barely a day off. During that same time span, he also met his fiancée, DJ Alison Wonderland, and welcomed his first child, who was born two weeks after the trilogy wrapped. (Wonderland, nine months pregnant at the time, cameos in the film spinning records at a nightclub.)

“Weirdly enough, my first place in Los Angeles was also on Hollywood Boulevard,” West says, crossing the street toward Maxine’s second-story dump, which usually houses overstock from the Hollywood Suit Outlet next door.

He moved to L.A. in 2005 after wrapping “The Roost,” figuring the natural progression of things was to head west and write another script. Relocation was daunting. “There’s no real sense of where you’re supposed to live and who to send the script to,” he laughs. His first spot was quieter — “a little garden apartment, very L.A.” — but it amused him to get mail addressed to Ti West, Hollywood Blvd.

“I didn’t have an interest in telling that ‘Hollywood chews you up and spits you out’ story,” says West, on Hollywood Boulevard where the movie was shot.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Nearly two decades later, he’s lived and worked here for so long that he pokes fun at being that naive kid who hoped he’d be instantly handed the keys to the city. In truth, his ascent has been a grind. West kept at it, as did colleagues Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski and the Duplass Brothers, who also premiered films alongside “The Roost” at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, the year that mumblecore became a movement.

They were all “making very tiny movies,” West remembers. “I think that’s where the chip on your shoulder comes from: Why doesn’t someone just realize all the work I’ve been putting in? Why don’t they know that I’m up 19 hours a day, seven days a week, working on this thing?” He describes those lean, exhausting years like someone who’s scaled his share of mountains.

“But I came of age in the ’90s, when making independent movies was cool,” he continues. “Are the 25-year-olds sleeping on floors doing that now? Or do they want to be making influencer content? Probably I would have wanted to do that too because if it goes viral, you just jump ahead. If you’re trying to change your life, that’s a quicker path.”

“We were in the Old West town and I was like, ‘Ti, this is the coolest job in the world,’” says Goth. “And he looked at me like, ‘I know.’ And we were just so giddy.”

(A24)

West’s first climb when he arrived in town was a hike up to the Hollywood sign before more fences and alarms were erected around it. “I had to do it,” he recalls. “I just thought, ‘Are they really going to arrest me?’” He hesitates, then chuckles. “Maybe the answer’s yes.” But he got away with it and was permitted to legally return while scouting for “MaXXXine” as he wanted to stage a showdown under the letters. For practical reasons, he was forced to rebuild the sign nearly to scale in Santa Clarita. Even so, the shoot was so tight on time and money that he had just eight hours to film at the duplicate site, including a lunch break and the commute up and down the hill.

“PTSD,” West mutters, flashing back to the hectic pace as he continues down Hollywood Boulevard and turns into the alleyway where Maxine gets menaced by a Buster Keaton clone. Every scene shot on the busy street — and there are a lot of them — had to be completed in four days, with the vintage store fronts mostly erected the morning-of to make sure the sets weren’t destroyed. When the film’s phony video shop went up, West’s phone buzzed with texts from friends who’d happened to drive by. A few asked if he was behind the fake signage; others mistakenly celebrated it as real.

“It’s just a circus at all times and nobody really cares that you’re shooting a movie,” says West, in front of the Hollywood Theatre.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

“To turn this all into an X-rated area was a very big project, lots of neon,” West says. As he gestures toward the marquees of the Déjà Vu gentlemen’s club and the Vine Theatre (both seen in “MaXXXine”), a bus pulls up and unloads 50 or so Scientologists in matching navy skirts and trousers who politely ignore his descriptions of sin as they head into the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition. West is also unfazed. “We had to be out here in the chaos of it all. It shows in the movie.”

Some days, he got lucky. West wanted an insert shot of Theda Bara’s star on the Walk of Fame as a nod to Pearl’s pet gator, and, magically, it was just steps from the Déjà Vu. Kevin Bacon, playing one of “MaXXXine’s” heavies, has his own star across the intersection, while Giancarlo Esposito, cast in a memorable role as Maxine’s agent, is embedded three streets to the east.

But this is also the block where an angry driver smashed through the barricades and crashed into a parked car in the middle of filming. The cops who were hired to guard the set had to abandon their posts in pursuit. West and the cast and crew held their positions and finished the scene.

“From making a movie here, I realize it’s difficult to get permits because the neighborhoods just don’t want movies shooting,” West says. “But it’s Hollywood. If there’s ever a reason to be in traffic, it should be because Will Smith is flipping a car in the middle of the street. Every other reason to be stuck in traffic sucks.”

West hopes to stage his next movie in a more controlled environment. He’s 40 pages into that script — “It will not be a trilogy, I assure you of that” — and already imagining the comforts of constructing a set that’s “meticulous and complicated.” He’s challenging himself to surprise audiences and top all three Maxine films combined. “That’s the goal: You put in the reps and you keep getting better.”

“She’s not trying to work for UNICEF,” West says of Goth’s Maxine Minx, “but I’m just trying to put you on her side in the movie so that by the end of ‘MaXXXine,’ you’re like, ‘I’m just glad she made it.’”

(A24)

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But for now, he’s focused on getting people to root for the trials and tribulations of his marvelously wicked Maxine Minx. Right after the car crash, West and Goth hustled to film a scene of Maxine strutting the red carpet at Mann’s Chinese.

Eventually, “MaXXXine” itself will debut there too: an ’80s-chic world premiere with Angelyne parked outside in her pink Corvette and attendees dressed like Gordon Gekko and Sunset Strip metal heads. West wears a white suit jacket — “very ‘Miami Vice,’” he says — while his toddler sports “Risky Business”-style sunglasses and charms paparazzi by giving them a let’s-do-lunch-babe finger point.

That was a couple days ago and West is back with us at the Chinese’s autographed concrete, still finding his footing in the surreality of it all. He nods approvingly that the town hasn’t swapped out its shoe prints of classic stars for, well, Shrek.

“The movies aren’t going anywhere, because telling stories is how people communicate,” he says. Tenacious creatives like Maxine and Pearl and yes, even he and Goth, are now part of Hollywood lore. West exhales. “Maybe someday, someone will say, ‘I really like those old movies — like ‘MaXXXine.’”