Will Smith is invincible.
No, I don’t mean his character in Sony’s superhero send-up Hancock, his latest Fourth of July extravaganza. I mean the actor himself. Hancock raked in about $107 million since opening last Tuesday and further cements Smith’s status as not only the king of Hollywood, but maybe the world in general. (Sorry, James Cameron.) I can’t think of another star who is as consistently bankable, whether the movie is even any good or not. And if you believed the critics, Hancock was not. It was pretty thoroughly spanked by the thumbs-up/thumbs-down set, but audiences didn’t care. They went anyway, despite the fact that the guy played an unlikeable booze-guzzling jerk with superpowers.
Just think about that. Big Willy is so loved that moviegoers will even pay to see him act like an ass. And every other studio in town recognizes this and simply got out of the way. During a season when there’s at least two or three big new movies opening every weekend, not a single other flick was willing to take him on. Second place during the holiday weekend went to Pixar’s WALL-E, which was a holdover from last week.
If you take a look at the guy’s filmography on IMDB, his resume is surprisingly not all that deep. His first big movie was Bad Boys in 1995, a nothing-special Michael Bay action movie. But then came that little alien invasion flick, Independence Day, and from then on out it’s been hit after hit.
So just what is it about Smith that’s turned him into a Hollywood cash machine? Well, Sony head of distribution Rory Bruer told the AP: “Will Smith, Mom, apple pie and the Fourth of July. It doesn’t get any better. People just so relate to him and the characters that he plays. They totally embraced it as something different, something fresh.”
That’s pretty spot on. I’m still waiting for the train wreck of a bomb that’ll break the streak of eight straight number 1 movies, but it hasn’t happened yet. And I’m starting to think it never will. If he can get audiences to pay money to see something like Wild Wild West, Will Smith will be making hits for a long time.
Comments
John MacAyeal Says:
July 7th, 2008 at 9:23 am
In a 60 Minutes interview, Smith didn’t seem to attribute his success to his own talents. He said that after studying the industry he found that films heavy on special effects tend to have the most success, so he decided to concentrate on them. I’d be interested to see how he’d do in a low-budget, character-driven film. Without the safety blanket of special effects, would he have enough charisma to pull in an audience?
S Morris Says:
July 7th, 2008 at 10:16 am
John MacAyeal, have you seen “Six Degrees of Separation”, “The Pursuit of Happyness”, “Hitch”, “Ali”, “The Legend of Bagger Vance”. None of those movies had a blanket of special effects however he did very well in those and in the box office.
Patrice Sarath Says:
July 7th, 2008 at 10:47 am
I think of Will Smith as the Jimmy Stewart of the current age. Likable, personable, charming. Turns out Stewart was just playing himself, and I think Smith is too.
And the reviews of Hancock were not all bad — see the New York Times’ review, which recognized the ambitions and the ambivalence of the movie. I mean, for a superhero movie, that’s pretty deep.
John MacAyeal Says:
July 7th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Point taken, S Morris. In fact I have seen “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” in the winter of 2000 when it came out, and thought it was a fairly good flick, with a nice, emotional ending. Don’t know why it slipped my mind.
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