Every Eddie Murphy Movie, Ranked
Updated January 2023 to add You People.
After a successful stand-up career in the 1970s and a wildly acclaimed run on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s, Eddie Murphy launched his film career (while still on SNL) in 1982 and has been appearing on the big screen fairly steadily in the decades since, starring in over 40 titles. To date, Murphy's films have grossed over $6 billion worldwide, but only occasionally has the material on screen matched Murphy's comedic talents—and, even when it has, reviews have sometimes been less positive than you might expect. In the gallery above, we rank all of his films to date (including his newest, Coming 2 America) from worst to best by Metascore, which reflects the consensus of professional critics for each film.
Though it has a small following as a cult classic (or is that an occult classic?), this Wes Craven-directed 1995 horror-comedy is not only one of Murphy's lowest-scoring films, it's also one of his biggest box office flops, grossing under $20 million. Vampire is the second film in which Murphy plays multiple characters (following Coming to America)—here, he portrays an Italian gangster and a preacher in addition to his main role as the vampire Maximillian opposite Angela Bassett's half-vampire cop—and that would turn into a trend for the actor over the following decade.
“Neither all that scary nor all that hilarious, Vampire in Brooklyn falls directly between the two, into the valley of mediocrity.” —Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle