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.
This 1984 union of comedy stars Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy proved to be far less than the sum of its parts, especially because its parts were never actually unified. Directed by Willard Huyck (who would follow this film with another notorious flop, Howard the Duck), Defense was originally a Moore vehicle that found him playing a military engineer. Only after a series of disastrous test screenings was a new, completely disconnected storyline involving Murphy (as a tank commander two years later) inserted into the film; Murphy and Moore never share any screen time.
“It really isn't easy to make a movie as mind-bendingly bad as Best Defense. It takes hard work, a very great deal of money and people so talented that it matters when they fail with such utter lack of distinction.” —Vincent Canby, The New York Times
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