Will Smith Is A True Box Office Star Again

Will Smith Is A True Box Office Star Again

Thanks to Aladdin and Bad Boys For Life, Will Smith is back on top at the box office. What elements helped get him to his box office rebound?

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Will Smith Is A True Box Office Star Again

Over the past year, Will Smith has managed to revive his status as a box office draw thanks to the enormous hauls from Aladdin and Bad Boys for Life. Both movies, riding a wave of 1990s nostalgia, surpassed all expectations and scored some of the biggest opening weekends ever for a Will Smith movie. It’s an impressive feat for an actor who’s been consistently headlining movies for 24 years now. However, during his time as a movie star, Smith hasn’t exclusively seen box office hits. In fact, directly prior to Aladdin, Smith was on a bit of a box office cold streak.

Granted, in the span of his career, Smith has had plenty of hits to balance out the recent misses. In fact, for his first decade as a movie star, he was regularly seen as a box office juggernaut. Save for the occasional Wild Wild West, Smith could reliably be counted on to deliver exceptional box office results through crowdpleaser titles like Hitch and I, Robot. However, Smith’s streak of box office hits came to a sudden close in December 2008 thanks to the drama Seven Pounds. After that underperforming title, he proceeded to take a 4-year-long hiatus from acting.

Related: Will Smith Starred In Two Movies With The Same Plot In The Same Year

Smith’s box office cold streak began shortly after he came back from that hiatus. While his first title back, Men in Black 3, managed to perform solidly at the box office, After Earth was a costly dud that ended up making less, domestically, than Seven Pounds. But now, several years later, Smith has returned to being a box office star, at least to some extent. Movies like Bad Boys for Life and Aladdin have shown that, though it’s fair to say that those movies’ box office also did well because of them being a sequel and remake, respectively. Regardless, the fact that they did so well is a testament to Smith still being a major star.

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Interestingly, while there have been a handful of darker Smith projects (namely I Am Legend) that still made money, the majority of Smith’s biggest hits have seen him starring in light-hearted fare as a wisecracking protagonist. Too many of Smith’s post-hiatus projects, chiefly Concussion and Collateral Beauty, eschewed this formula that Smith excels in, which led to him having a cold streak at the domestic box office. However, even in this period, Smith starred in one of his highest-grossing movies of all-time: Suicide Squad. That film’s success was likely more attributable to the DC Comics brand name than Smith alone, but it still showed he could headline a lucrative project in the modern age.

That’s a truth that’s been heavily reinforced over the last year thanks to the wildly successful box office runs of Aladdin and Bad Boys for Life, both of which were more lighthearted titles featuring a comical and charming Will Smith that audiences like to see. In between those successful titles, though, Smith headlined the box office dud Gemini Man. That Ang Lee movie’s grim marketing, placing an emphasis on a cold, stiff version of Smith, reinforced what kind of cinema audiences like to exclusively see this movie star in. As long as Smith keeps on starring in films like Aladdin and Bad Boys for Life, his status as a box office star will likely keep enduring for years to come.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/will-smith-bad-boys-3-aladdin-box-office-success/

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