valikez olyenah laurytz
Domenec Reynolds
The news comes from Bloomberg reporter Lucas Shaw, who tweeted about another Smith project being delayed in the wake of the now-infamous Oscars slap, then followed it up by revealing that Bright would no longer get a sequel. This is, apparently, "unrelated to the incident" though.
Last week, we heard that a long-in-development animated adaptation of comic book series Bone has reportedly been canceled before the first episode even aired and the tally of Netflix canceled shows this year alone includes Archive 81, The Baby-Sitters Club, Gentefied and On the Verge. To that list you can now add Raising Dion, canceled by Netflix despite an 83% Rotten Tomatoes score.
Directed by Max Landis and starring Smith and Joel Edgerton, Bright is an urban fantasy in which humans coexist uneasily with orcs and elves. Smith is an LAPD cop, while Edgerton plays his orc partner.
It's actually a pretty neat concept, and one that allowed the story to explore racism and police corruption, but unfortunately it just wasn't very good. As the Chicago Sun-Times put it, "Bright is basically a tired buddy-cop movie dressed up in bizarre trappings."
Netflix reportedly has plans to increase revenue by cracking down on account sharing and introducing an ad-funded tier, and it could also experiment with the nuclear option of ending binge-watching. However, with Netflix stock plunging Bright 2 may just be too expensive for the service to take a bet on.
Plus, while Smith's Oscars incident may not be the direct cause of the reported cancellation, it can't have helped either. Still, we won't exactly mourn the demise of Bright 2 and will instead console ourselves with the 5 best new movies to stream this week on HBO Max, Netflix and more.
In other streaming news, fans of The Wire may want to watch We Own This City online, while Starz is true to its name pulling in Sean Penn and Julia Roberts: you can watch Gaslit online starting this weekend.
Widely considered the movie that established Smith as a viable big-screen star (though not, as some believe, Smith's first movie), this 1993 dramedy is a Fred Schepisi-directed adaptation of John Guare's Pulitzer-nominated stage play which in turn was based on the true story of con man David Hampton, who convinced a number of wealthy New Yorkers that he was the son of Sidney Poitier. (He wasn't; instead, he was their friendly neighborhood robber.) Smith plays the charlatan (here renamed Paul) opposite Stockard Channing (returning from the original stage production) and Donald Sutherland, and critics think the one-time rapper holds his own against his more established stars in one of the better stage-to-screen adaptations of the past three decades.
Several films that Will Smith produced but did not star in could be dismissed as "vanity projects." But if there's one film in which he appears that merits such a label, it is this one. The only film on which Smith has a writing credit (technically, a "story by" credit), this 2013 sci-fi action-thriller finds Smith starring alongside his son Jaden Smith for the second time (following the much better 2006 drama The Pursuit of Happyness). Directed by M. Night Shyamalan at his career nadir (it came just after his lowest-scoring film, The Last Airbender), After Earth finds the two Smiths playing a father and son who must fight for survival after crash landing on a hostile 31st century Earth that has been abandoned by humans. It isn't quite the worst film rumored to be based on the teachings of Scientology (this one is), but it is mostly terrible, hampered by a thin, nonsensical story and likely the worst performance either Smith has ever delivered (though at least the young Jaden has the excuse of being forced into a role he was not yet ready for).
Two years after his Oscar-nominated turn in The Pursuit of Happyness, Will Smith reunited with the director of that film, Gabriele Muccino, for another drama. But there were few accolades for this 2008 dud that found Smith playing an IRS agent hiding a major secret who sets out to improve the lives of seven strangers. Seven Pounds performed decently at the box office, but critics mostly hated it, calling the film overly sentimental, pompous, phony, and silly.
Smith immediately followed his first sequel (2002's Men in Black II) with his second. Bad Boys II returned both Smith and Martin Lawrence and director Michael Bay from their 1995 buddy-cop comedy, and the result was both a bigger box office hit (nearly doubling the grosses of the original) and a lesser film. Few critics liked the sequel, with reviewers finding it dumbed-down, devoid of laughs, and overly long, but that didn't stop the two stars from returning for another sequel 17 years later.
Trying to escape the shadow of his notorious 1999 flop Wild Wild West, Smith took on a very different role in a very different kind of movie, but the result was another failure (albeit on a smaller scale). The Robert Redford-directed Bagger Vance is an adaptation of Steven Pressfield's golf novel (itself modeled after the Bhagavad Gita) set in Depression-era Georgia, with Smith playing a sort-of magical caddie to Matt Damon's troubled golfer who has been traumatized by his involvement in WWI. Despite the solid cast (which also includes Charlize Theron as well as Jack Lemmon in his final role), critics and audiences weren't impressed, and the film grossed under $40 million during its late 2000 run.
Will Smith's first voiceover performance in an animated film came in this 2004 DreamWorks Animation feature that weirdly shoehorns an organized crime story into an undersea children's comedy (complete with Italian-American stereotypes, according to groups that protested the film). Smith takes the lead as the voice of Oscar, a fish who becomes entangled with the shark mafia after he is mistakenly believed to be the killer of a crime lord's oldest son (voiced by The Sopranos' own Michael Imperioli). Other voices come from the likes of mob movie and TV veterans like Robert De Niro, Vincent Pastore, and even Martin Scorsese, and Shark Tale went on to gross $375 million and earn an animated feature Oscar nomination despite reviews that were mediocre at best.
The only Will Smith film to gross more than $1 billion is this 2019 live-action reimagining of Disney's 1992 animated classic. Directed, oddly enough, by Guy Ritchie (it's both his only PG-rated film and his only musical), the remake finds Smith taking on the role of Genie originated by the late Robin Williams. And despite the fact that Smith is a Grammy-winning recording artist, Aladdin is his first (and only) musical as well, and the rapper performed classic Aladdin numbers like "Friend Like Me" and "Prince Ali" in the film. Critics were a bit less than delighted by the film, though they generally liked Smith's performance (and would have liked it even more but for the "ghastly CGI" used to put his face on a floating blue body).
Written and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris), this 2015 caper stars Smith as a con man who becomes romantically entangled with his protege (Margot Robbie). A modest hit, Focus earned decent reviews from some critics who appreciated the film as enjoyable escapist entertainment. But other reviewers found it dull and overly slick.
After taking a rare four-year break from acting (a period in which he took on a more active role as a film producer on projects including his son's star turn in a remake of The Karate Kid), Smith returned to the big screen in 2012 with his first "threequel," a follow-up to 2002's Men in Black II. This third MIB film (which also returned star Tommy Lee Jones and director Barry Sonnenfeld, and added Josh Brolin as a younger version of Jones's character) actually scored better with critics than the prior installment and grossed nearly $200 million more at the box office. But for now it stands as the final film in the series with those men; a poorly received 2019 sequel/spinoff featured an all-new cast and a different director.
Seventeen years after the poorly reviewed Bad Boys II, stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence returned in early 2020 for a superior sequel, this time directed by the duo of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (who are now at work on a Batgirl film for HBO Max) rather than Michael Bay. Life was a big hit, grossing over $425 million (or about as much as the two previous films combined) despite being forced to close early in some markets due to the pandemic, and a fourth film is now in development.
We wouldn't dare joke about I, Robot this Christmas. Nor should you: It's not really worth the effort. Directed by Alex Proyas (Dark City), this middling sci-fi action thriller very loosely inspired by Isaac Asimov's short story collection of the same name (so loosely that it borrows little more than a title and Asimov's famed "three laws of robotics") is set in a dystopian near future filled with intelligent robots. Smith stars as a Chicago homicide detective who investigates the death of the founder (James Cromwell) of a leading robotics company and identifies a robot (Alan Tudyk) as his prime suspect. I, Robot boasts Oscar-caliber visual effects (it was nominated) but not an award-worthy plot: Critics find it poorly paced and disappointingly rote and derivative.
Smith's second (and, to date, final) Oscar nomination for best actor came for this 2006 film which is one of the few straight dramas the actor has appeared in. Co-starring for the first time with his real-life son Jaden Smith (here making his film debut at the age of eight), the elder Smith plays Chris Gardner, a father and salesman who is left homeless (and wifeless) after a risky business decision and underpayment of income taxes leave him unable to pay his rent. But an unpaid internship at a stock brokerage eventually leads to a much better life in this feel-good, true-story drama adapted from the real Gardner's memoir. Some critics found the film as a whole "slick" and "manipulative," but nearly all reviewers praised Smith's performance.
90f70e40cf