What was Will Smith’s first movie?

For better or worse, the 94th Academy Award will always be the night everyone remembers when they think about Will Smith.

On the one hand, the indomitable A-lister who’d ruled over Hollywood for decades as one of its biggest, most bankable, popular, and highest-paid stars secured the crowning achievement of his career when he was named ‘Best Actor’ at the Oscars for his performance as the title character in King Richard.

On the other, he’d already torpedoed his reputation and shocked the world by striding onto the very stage he’d return to less than an hour later and busting Chris Rock right across the chops. The fallout was vast, and while it’s either unfair or too early to say that it marked the beginning of the end for Smith as a mainstream concern, few stars have ever lost as much shine in a single moment.

Deciding to play it safe, his first major theatrical release didn’t arrive for more than two years after the incident, and it was a sequel. Bad Boys: Ride or Die made money because it was the latest chapter in a hit franchise that’s been building audience goodwill since the mid-1990s, but the real test for whether or not Smith has still got it will come when he has to open a movie without having anything to rely on but himself.

Illustrative of his meteoric rise from musician and sitcom favourite to all-conquering actor, Smith was the industry’s hottest leading man five years after his feature debut. The consecutive releases of Bad Boys, Independence Day, and Men in Black wasted little time entrenching him as a name guaranteed to put butts in seats, all the more impressive when he only had three big-screen credits under his belt before Michael Bay’s buddy cop caper was released.

Smith’s first movie saw him billed eighth in the cast of the 1992 drama Where the Day Takes You, which followed the misadventures of teenage runaways on the streets of Los Angeles. He played Manny, a homeless man with no legs who befriends Dermot Mulroney’s ringleader, an inauspicious start to a career that would explode in the near future.

He ceded the spotlight to Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg in Made in America the following year, which arrived in multiplexes seven months before Six Degrees of Separation, which offered the first inkling that Smith could handle drama, too. After that, he wouldn’t appear in another movie for a year and a half, only for Bad Boys to change everything.

So, what is Will Smith’s highest-grossing movie?

Underlining his star power, Smith has starred in 14 movies that earned more than $300 million at the global box office, and he was the top-billed name in the cast in every single one of them.

Seven of them sailed past half a billion dollars, but surprisingly, he’s only been in one billion-dollar hit for someone of his name value, appeal, and recognition. He wasn’t the reason behind its success, either, with the ongoing obsession for Disney’s live-action remakes propelling Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin past the ten-figure mark.

While having somebody of Smith’s calibre stepping into the daunting shoes of Robin Williams as Genie certainly helped bump up its earnings, the success of his highest-grossing film can’t be laid exclusively at his door.

…and why did Will Smith turn down Django Unchained?

Smith teaming up with Quentin Tarantino was a mouthwatering prospect, and while Jamie Foxx more than held up his end of the bargain in Django Unchained, it would have been a completely different movie had it been the former ‘Fresh Prince’ teaming up with Christoph Waltz to pit his wits against Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L Jackson.

Unfortunately, Smith decided he didn’t want to be in the film because he wasn’t interested in telling a story about the slavery era. On paper, that’s fair enough, apart from the fact that ten years after Django Unchained was released, he starred in Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation, which, of course, was a story about slavery.

Related Topics

This post was originally published on here