Will Smith has been dealing with a significant amount of career fallout after his now infamous slap to Chris Rock on the Oscars stage, While some of what’s happened in the career of Smith looks to be merely the normal fluctuations of development hell, other projects have reportedly been put on hold specifically because of the incident. Smith had a pair of Netflix projects in the hopper that are not currently moving forward, but he will be appearing on the streaming service soon, as a guest of David Letterman.
The next season of David Letterman’s interview show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman is set to drop on Netflix on May 20, and among the guests who will appear, according to THR, is Will Smith. However, if you were planning on tuning in to hear Smith talk in depth about his Academy Awards experience, you’ll be out of luck, as the interview was taped prior to this year’s Oscars.
This may be the one place to find Will Smith on Netflix for a while. The actor had a pair of movie projects in development with the streamer, but they’re not currently moving forward. One movie, Fast & Loose, has reportedly been given less priority by Netflix at the moment. The decision to put the movie on hold appears to be related to the slap situation. It’s possible the movie could still be made down the road, it’s ultimate fate is far from clear.
A second Netflix movie, Bright 2, has a fate that’s significantly more transparent. The movie is dead. Netflix has reportedly scrapped the movie entirely and will not be moving forward with it., However, reports indicate that the decision to not move forward with Bright 2 was made independently of the slap incident. It’s somewhat surprising considering the first Bright was Netflix’s biggest hit to date when it was released, but the movie was clearly struggling prior to now. Bright 2 had been in a holding pattern since 2019.
A third Will Smith project, Bad Boys 4 is also currently in a holding pattern. With the third entry in the franchise, Bad Boys for Life, being the biggest movie of 2020 it was expected the already announced fourth entry would be along in short order, but the fate of this one is also currently unknown.
It will certainly be an interesting sort of time capsule to see an in depth interview with Will Smith that doesn’t deal with this situation. At some point the King Richard Oscar winner will likely sit down for a long interview with somebody to talk about what happened, and the repercussions from it, but when we’ll see that, or even another movie from him, is far from certain.
