Let’s get this out of the way up top: no one really cares about “The Slap.” It's been two years since Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards, and while some people out there may still be clutching their pearls over the incident, it's not nearly as many as the box-office pundits would have us believe. Still, since Bad Boys: Ride Or Die is Smith's first major release since that fateful Oscar night, all eyes were on the movie's opening weekend performance to see if audiences en masse would welcome back the infamous awards-show aggressor. The numbers are in and—surprise! Hollywood’s Most Bankable Star remains bankable. He might not win any more Oscars any time soon (eight years left on that ban) but Big Willie’s spot on Last Movie Star Rushmore next to Tom Cruise is safe and sound.
But what’s great about Will Smith is, even though this box office haul was more or less predestined—beloved stars returning to a beloved franchise, the previous installment of which also shattered records just four years ago—he’s going to hit the pavement and promote this thing like it’s 1995 again. And with that, we got one of the best Will Smith press runs in recent memory, a charming and savvy promo tour that tripled down on his age-old charm.
The Fresh Prince has had a chokehold on social media; we’ve all been seeing and sharing a new Will Smith clip for at least the last five days. Here’s Will telling the Nelk Boys of Full Send Podcast that Pursuit of Happyness is his best movie, while not even bothering to feign humility towards the memes about his box office greatness. He did go the humble route when Shannon Sharpe and Ochocinco asked him to weigh in on an age-old debate about whether Martin or The Fresh Prince was the greatest Black sitcom of the '90s. Watch veteran host Sway tee Will up to rhapsodize about the impact legendary rapper Grandmaster Caz had on his whole persona, just to get genuinely ecstatic when Sway surprises him with Caz in the studio. Surely you’ve seen the tiktok of Will trading daps inside of a random movie theater where he watched Ride or Die with a civilian audience. And my personal favorite: The Kid Mero and Carmelo Anthony coaxing Will to sound the most West Philly he has in decades, using an exchange with one of his sons as an analogy to achieving greatness.
It’s almost jarring to hear Will recount an anecdote that aligns itself with the common Black Parenting experience, considering most of the narratives around his two youngest children since they became celebrities in their own right is how “different” they are. Of course, the unorthodox nature of the Smith household has been in conversation for years now, thanks to one of the most painfully transparent marriages in Hollywood history. So it’s intriguing that the common thread through all of Smith’s viral moments during his Ride or Die media blitz has been that he, like that last tweet says, is just being real as fuck. Most of this tour has, save a Full Send there or Hot Ones here, been in communion with his Black fans in particular: the ones who have boosted all four Bad Boys films to date, and who, in a common refrain that I’ve noticed on social media this past week, have proclaimed that “we” never turned our backs on Will Smith over the thing with Chris Rock. It’s a mindset Will likely picked up on and leaned into, and it’s paid off handsomely.
In crafting a post-Slap press run that wisely didn’t lean into actually addressing that or adopting a general mea culpa/“please take me back” tone (with the exception of going on Hot Ones, arguably a form of self-flagellation), Will’s managed to make himself feel more relatable than he has in some time. Sure, he’s always been universally, uncontroversially beloved (which is why The Slap was so jarring initially), but he’s also a triple-A star who increasingly felt several degrees separated from reality, as all entertainers at that level of fame inevitably do—plus an added layer of Hollyweird thanks to entanglements and such. His appearances in the last week shrewdly brought him a little bit closer to the stratosphere, and in a rare moment when enthusiasm for the press run matched enthusiasm for the actual movie. And in so doing, he also may have just saved the summer.
The King of the Box Office is back. Watch him show you how to do this.