No, this isn’t going to be about Will Packer, Dawn Hudson, and their ilk reacting to Will Smith slapping Chris Rock on Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony, both immediately after it happened and, in the days, after in terms of whatever punishment could be dished up. This isn’t going to be a morality rant about what happened earlier this week, albeit Smith’s apology seems to concede “something awful.” However, there will be consequences. Smith’s economic value is now based on existing franchises, and this episode may have harmed his value in non-franchise films.
Will Smith has been a movie star since he raced down a city street after violent drug traffickers in Michael Bay’s early 1995 blockbuster Bad Boys, his undone shirt blowing in the wind. In Roland Emmerich’s $820 million-grossing Independence Day in the summer of 1996, he knocked out an extraterrestrial and shouted “Welcome to Earth.” Furthermore, from about 2002 to 2008, he was the world’s largest movie star, placing butts in seats for a variety of genres, both with and without existing IP.
Romantic comedies (Hitch), animated films (DreamWorks’ A Shark’s Tale), sci-fi fantasies (I, Robot), action adventures (Bad Boys II), superhero dramedies (Hancock, still the highest-grossing original superhero film), apocalyptic melodramas (I Am Legend, whose $77 million domestic debut in 2007 is still the highest for a solo star vehicle), and economic mobility dramas (The Pursuit of Happi Smith was the franchise even as Hollywood chased the four-quadrant IP franchise money in the wake of Harry Potter, Spider-Man, and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Men in Black II was released in 2002 in response to the commercial failures of The Legend of Bagger Vance and Ali. I believe he made Men in Black 3 in response to the mixed reviews for Hancock and the commercial failure of Seven Pounds. Inexplicably, the over-budget and long-delayed MIB3 turned out to be the greatest of the trilogy, grossing a robust $179 million domestically and $623 million internationally, right with The Avengers a decade ago. However, Will Smith’s triumph come to characterize the latter decade of his career. In obvious “sequel to that Will Smith movie you loved” expansions and as an additional value element, he’s still worth his enormous budget, but practically anything else is (at best) a coin flip.
