The tagline "Whatcha gonna do?" comes from which 1995 movie?

The tagline “Whatcha gonna do?” comes from the 1995 movie Bad Boys. The action-comedy stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as Miami detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett, who must protect a witness while investigating a major heroin theft.

The wording is closely tied to the film’s marketing and to the familiar chorus of Inner Circle’s 1987 song “Bad Boys,” which asks, “Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?” The song had already become strongly associated with the television series Cops, so many people remember the phrase as a general police-show reference rather than specifically as a movie tagline.

Bad Boys was directed by Michael Bay and produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. It became the first film in a successful franchise, followed by Bad Boys II in 2003, Bad Boys for Life in 2020, and Bad Boys: Ride or Die in 2024. A common mix-up is confusing the tagline with the song itself: the movie uses and popularized the phrase in its own advertising, but the musical line predates the film.