Rush Hour 4 in the works at Paramount after reports of Trump interference | Paramount Pictures

Rush Hour 4 is said to be a trip to Paramount – after Donald Trump intervened on behalf of the film.

The studio will now release the upcoming sequel from director Brett Ratner, who bowed out of Hollywood after numerous allegations of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo movement.

Ratner had shopped the latest film in the franchise, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, around Hollywood for years without success. But then Trump lobbied his friend and supporter Larry Ellison, the largest shareholder in the new Paramount Skydance company — which, earlier this year, as Paramount Global, settled a lawsuit with Trump over a critical CBS News interview with the president.

According to Puck’s Matthew Bellone, Paramount has secured financing for the film and agreed to a distribution deal with Warner Bros., which previously owned the fast-talking buddy cop franchise under the New Line banner. “Get ready for the stupidest state-controlled media,” Bellone wrote on social media.

Ratner was accused of multiple sexual assault cases in 2017, derailing his career. He sued Melanie Kohler, a former Endeavor Talent Agency employee who claimed the director “preyed” on her at a club and raped her at the home of Robert Evans, a famous Hollywood producer, for defamation after she filed a complaint; The two settled down in 2018. In a 2017 statement, Koehler said she hoped Ratner would be held accountable “for the way he treats the nobodies in the world or at least the way he treats me.”

Ratner recently directed a $40 million documentary about Melania Trump for Amazon MGM Studios, owned by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire CEO, who has also maintained cordial relations with the president. The film is scheduled to hit theaters on January 30.

The first three Rush Hour films grossed over $850 million worldwide and were extremely popular in China.

A fourth film has long been in the works, though Ratner has struggled to secure financing despite the film industry’s increasing reliance on franchise fare and recycled intellectual properties.

“Does the world really need or want Rush Hour 4?” Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote: “If that were the case, surely we’d be getting it by now? Market forces in the brutally commercial Darwinian jungle of franchise cinema would have created Rush Hour 4.”

The new film is widely seen as part of Trump’s effort during his second term to reintroduce old-fashioned masculinity into Hollywood culture, after appointing Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight and Mel Gibson as unofficial “special ambassadors” to Hollywood.