Here’s why Will Smith is a box office megastar, despite only having one $1 billion movie to his name. Last year, Smith followed in the footsteps of the late, great Robin Williams by playing the singing, dancing, and occasionally wish-granting Genie in Disney’s live-action remake of its animated Aladdin adaptation. The blockbuster went on to become Smith’s highest-grossing film of all time (unadjusted for inflation), as well as his first to ever pass the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office.
It’s a little surprising Smith doesn’t have more billion-dollar hits to his name, considering the sheer number of box office records he’s broken since becoming a full-blown movie star in the mid-’90s. He’s still the only actor to have eight consecutive films pass $100 million at the U.S. box office (a streak which began with Men in Black II in 2002 and ended six years later with Seven Pounds), and continued to appear in lucrative tentpoles like Suicide Squad after that, leading up to Aladdin. As a side effect of the coronavirus lockdowns, Smith’s Bad Boys for Life is even the top-grossing movie of 2020 so far (with $419 million).
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To understand why Smith doesn’t have more billion-dollar movies to his name, you have to look at the changes in the blockbuster landscape over the past two decades. When Smith was at the peak of his box office powers in the ’90s and ’00s, billion-dollar films were much less common than they were today. For instance, when Smith starred in Independence Day and Men in Black back to back in 1996 and ’97, the highest-grossing movie of all time was Jurassic Park at $914 million (not adjusted for inflation). It wasn’t until Titanic opened in theaters five months after MIB that billion-dollar tentpoles were even a thing.
Titanic was still one of a few exceptions to the rule until the latter half of the ’00s, when mega-hits Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men’s Chest and The Dark Knight both grossed over $1 billion during their initial runs and help to usher in an era where billion-dollar films are far more common. This was around the same time Smith went on a break after Seven Pounds and didn’t star in another movie until 2012’s Men in Black III, which arrived just a few weeks after The Avengers‘ game-changing opening. By that point, however, Smith had already recognized the age of star vehicles was ending and moviegoers were far more interested in franchises that A-list actors. He had even made plans to launch a shared universe of his own with 2013’s After Earth, only to abandon them when the film crashed and burned at the box office.
After that, Smith didn’t immediately gravitate to franchise fare, choosing to instead lend his talents to the con artist dramedy Focus and wannabe Oscar bait Concussion and Collateral Beauty. All three projects fell well short of the same box office heights reached by the actor’s movies in his prime, at a time when even character actors like Mark Ruffalo were adding one $1 billion hit after another to their resume thanks to their MCU appearances. Smith has seen more mixed success since then; while Suicide Squad and Aladdin were big hits, only the latter managed to pass the billion-dollar mark, and the actor’s last original live-action vehicle, 2019’s Gemini Man, was a flat-out bomb. Still, with Bad Boys 4 on the horizon, Smith’s career is still in pretty good shape. And who knows: perhaps the now-developing Aladdin 2 will give him his second billion-dollar hit.