Don't Worry About Will Smith

Boy, Will Smith is having a rough week. I haven't seen so much vitriol aimed a a mainstream movie since "John Carter" came out. Everyone in the media seemed to be falling over themselves to pronounce Smith latest, "After Earth," a bomb, well before any actual box office numbers came in. Reviews were largely negative, but they weren't "worst movie ever" bad, as I saw some Twitter users claiming over the weekend. Few people were talking about the actual content of the movie, but plenty were talking about the Smith family being Scientologists (which they've denied), M. Night Shyamalan being a hack, and the obvious nepotism of giving Jaden Smith such a large role in the movie. It seems a lot of people have beef with the Smith family, and they've been taking the opportunity to vent their spleen.

From a business standpoint the important part is that "After Earth" will likely spell the end of Will Smith's unprecedented box office streak that made him the king of summer blockbusters for more than a decade. Since 1996, every summer film he's starred in has made over $100 million domestically. However, Smith has been noticeably slowing down lately. Since 2008, he's only done one other film, "Men in Black 3" which brought in a decent, but unimpressive $170 million. His next will be Akiva Goldsmith's "A Winter's Tale," a smaller project where he only has a supporting role. Smith doesn't have any other big blockbuster-type films confirmed at the moment, and the worry is that if he doesn't put in more appearances at the top of the box office charts soon, his star wattage is going to take a serious hit.

Will Smith is one of the last of the real A-listers, the Hollywood leading men who can be counted on to open a picture. He still commands a big paycheck and has a lot of clout on his projects because people will still go to see a movie solely because he's in it. "After Earth" would not have been made without him, and certainly not with such a sizable budget. I think it's easy to see what went wrong here. Columbia, figured that lots of special effects and Smith's presence would be enough to convince moviegoers to show up, and some of them did. However, they didn't count on the negative effects of the movie also starring Jaden Smith, who audiences have never really warmed up to despite his high profile. Then there was director M. Night Shyamalan, whose name wasn't in any of the marketing, making it look like the studio was trying to hide his involvement. Worst of all, Smith wasn't playing a typical wisecracking, charismatic Will Smith character, but a dead serious authoritarian figure.

The audience had a lot of doubts from the reactions I saw to the trailers, doubts that were never adequately addressed. When the bad reviews started coming in, suddenly it was an excuse for everyone who ever had any complaint with the Smiths or Shyamalan or Scientology to start pushing back against the marketing hype. We had multiple articles with conspiracy nuts looking for Scientology messages in "After Earth" (none of them very convincing), dissections of Shyamalan's career woes, and endless speculation about Will Smith's parenting skills. It's doubtful that audiences are going to trust a Will Smith movie to be synonymous with a good time after this. "After Earth" may be the equivalent of Tom Cruise's couch-jumping moment on "Oprah" all those years ago, when the facade cracked and we started seeing the actor as a fallible human being instead of our favorite movie star.

Of course, Tom Cruise movies still do very well, and his career has been fine. "Oblivion" had a similar science-fiction premise to "After Earth," and it did decent business. However, Cruise's name doesn't have the same cachet that it once did, which is why the marketing department had to work a little harder, and they made sure that Morgan Freeman and all the spiffy CGI were featured in the trailers too. I don't think Smith should have any trouble getting back on track. He's only 44, and has a lot of photogenic years left. Another "Bad Boys" sequel ought to fix things right up. Also, the biggest complaint with "After Earth" in the end seemed to be the nepotism, which may be obnoxious, but much more understandable than Cruise's couch-jumping anti-mental health care antics.

Then again, we have to ask whether Smith wants to keep being king of the summer box office. He came up with the story for "After Earth," and we can probably assume that his character, Cypher Rage, is the kind of part that he's more interested in playing these days - darker, cooler, and more mature. It might be time for him to move on to another stage of his career and start looking at more diverse material. Personally, I'd be happy to see him making smaller, riskier movies like "Six Degrees of Separation" again, which I still think is best performance. Or maybe he's happier off the screen these days than on it.

But I don't see any reason to worry about him. All the biggest movie stars have had a few flops in them, and there are probably going to be far worse ones this summer. Stay tuned.
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