Will Smith explains how ‘After Earth’ was his worst movie. Find out what he has to say and read more on the story after the jump!
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During an interview with Esquire, Will Smith revealed that the 2013 ‘After Earth’ movie was hard to do because of his son Jaden’s involvement in the movie. ‘That was excruciating,’ said Will and he called ‘After Earth’ the worst experience of his career. The 46 year old actor said that the movie he starred in with his son, was the most “painful failure” of his three-decades long career. He compared his 1999 “Wild Wild West” movie to “After Earth” and said it was tougher to take on because he had gotten Jaden, who is now 16, involved in the film. In the movie “After Earth,” Will Smith and Jaden played a father-and-son team who was stranded on post-apocalyptic Earth. It was criticized heavily by critics and was one of the year’s biggest flops. It made $60.5 million on an estimated production budget of $130 million.
A Daily News review called the movie a “crashing bore,” filled with poky action scenes, sketchy plot details, and clunky production design that had “ravaged Earth looking like a Hawaiian back lot.” Smith said, the movie’s failure came at a hard time in his life. He states, “After ‘Earth’ comes out, I get the box office numbers on Monday and I was devastated for about 24 minutes, and then my phone rang and I found out my father had cancer,” he said. “That put it in perspective — viciously.” Smith told Esquire, “What I learned from that failure is how you win. I got reinvigorated after the failure of ‘After Earth.’ I stopped working for a year and a half…I had to dive into why it was so important for me to have No. 1 movies.”
Will Smith’s next movie, “Focus,” will open Feb. 27th.
