Will Smith implores universal forgiveness after the Oscar slap with a new installment of ‘Bad Boys’

In reality, the slap was not heard. But its shock wave reached the entire world. From the epicenter of the Kodak Theater stage, on March 27, 2022, that wave has continued to vibrate, overshadowing the career of Will Smith (Philadelphia, 55 years old), once a nice guy and loved by the public, who in 30 seconds destroyed his artistic future by getting up from his seat at the Oscar ceremony, going on stage and slapping comedian Chris Rock, who had just made a joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith’s alopecia. Not even the statuette that he won minutes later, as the protagonist of The Williams method Not even the messages of repentance that he issued some time later have served to make the audience forget that attack. Smith’s first major premiere arrives on Friday two years after the incident, and the actor has preferred to play it safe, enlist his friend Martin Lawrence and return to his favorite saga, Two rebel police officers, of which he is now launching the fourth installment, Bad Boys: Ride or Die. Now, is the world ready to forgive the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?

Between irony and recognition of error, Bad Boys: Ride or Die places its protagonists in the same position in which its star currently navigates: the clearing of his name, after his captain, who died in the previous installment, is accused of being a corrupt police officer in the pay of the drug cartels and, therefore, Therefore, they themselves are suspicious. There are a couple of jokes about the age of Mike Lowrey (Smith’s character), who is finally settling down after getting married after fifty, and a sequence of slaps that the star receives that does not seem like a gag banal. And yes, several cameos from Smith’s friends, including director Michael Bay, the filmmaker who started the saga. Of course, there are all kinds of explosions and acts of violence, and many requests for forgiveness for the use of weapons.

Instead, after the actual violence, it took Smith a long time to react and repent. In that crazy gala, after Rock’s slap, the actor returned to his seat next to his wife, a while later he won the Oscar, for which he thanked in a speech in which he said “love pushes you to do crazy things,” and Hours later, a video went viral in which he appeared dancing at the party. Vanity Fair one of his successes: Getting’ Jiggy Wit’ It. Just when the dramatic actor had left behind the long shadow of the rapper and comedian, immensely popular thanks to the series The prince of Bel Air, Smith himself sabotaged himself.

It took several months for him to come out asking for forgiveness, and he did so in a six-minute video posted on his YouTube channel and on his Instagram account, and only after Rock declared that he was not “ready to talk.” On camera, Smith said: “I’ve spent the last three months going around and trying to understand the nuances and the complexities of what happened at that moment. […] No part of me now thinks that was the right way to behave at the time. No part of me thinks that was the right way to handle a feeling of disrespect or insult.” He had already been banned, in April, for a decade from any event at the Hollywood Film Academy, hence the video arrived late.

The Smith family charity went under. Netflix decided to stop production of Fast and Loose, a thriller starring Smith, and he only picked it up again when Sony finished Bad Boys: Ride or Die. “Everyone was waiting to see who would blink first,” said one executive in Variety. “Netflix was not willing to be the first studio to do business with Will again.” Previously, Apple TV had premiered in December 2022 Emancipation, another film prepared for Smith to look like a great dramatic actor because it told the true story of a slave who fled from a plantation in 19th century Louisiana, and who went down the platform drain. Jada Pinkett Smith, who tried to reconcile the attacker and the victim, published her memoirs, in which she explained that they had been in separate homes for seven years; Even so, she supports him and has accompanied him in Los Angeles, along with her children and her mother, at the premiere of the fourth installment of Two rebel police officers.

That tour, after a surprise appearance by Smith at the last Coachella festival, where he performed Men in Black during J Balvin’s concert, it is the actor’s return to public life in an official way. In 14 days he was in eight countries, and stopped in Spain to take some photos in Madrid’s Plaza de la Cibeles and to participate in The anthill: It is his ninth appearance on Pablo Motos’ program. But the question remains: will the public forget the slap?

For Antonio Rubial, leader of A6 Cinema, the agency that represents performers like Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Clara Lago, Leonor Watling and Quim Gutiérrez, or directors like Rodrigo Sorogoyen and Javier Ruiz Caldera, there is only one way for someone in a situation like Will Smith’s to get ahead: “ Being humble. And truly asking for forgiveness. He has to be aware that he screwed up, because there are people who don’t see the mistake and that’s why anything he says is not credible. The public is not stupid, and if he feels that it comes from the heart, he forgives him.” Rubial would also advise someone in a similar situation to do interviews with media that were not friendly: “There is press and press. It is a mistake: part of the process is to be asked by journalists who make him uncomfortable, because he will be able to convey his message and thus the public will assume that he is serious.

Antonio Martín Guirado thinks in a similar way, member of By & For, the representation agency for athletes, includi
ng Atlético de Madrid star Antoine Griezmann: “Without knowing exactly the path that Smith has followed, I would advise him forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness, pure and simple repentance. Let there be no doubt about that regret, and let him stand before a front-row journalist to tell his feelings.” Martín Guirado asks for another prior commitment: “First he must have sat down and asked for forgiveness from the victim. Finally, he must look very carefully at the quality of the projects, because the other key, charisma, that helps get ahead of these problems, Smith has in abundance.”

Yeah Bad Boys 4 works at the box office, nothing can stop Smith: after this premiere they will arrive Fast and Loose and Sugar Bandits, in which Smith will play an Iraq veteran who joins other former colleagues to take down some drug dealers in Boston. Furthermore, he is filming the series From Pole to Pole, for National Geographic, in which a team filmed him going as a hiker from the South Pole to the North Pole.

In the United States, experts believe that in its first weekend, Bad Boys: Ride or Die will gross between 30 and 50 million dollars in 3,850 theaters. The Sony studio marked the minimum of 30 million; Other analysts suggest 45 million as more likely. Any box office that comes close to that amount will confirm that Smith has managed to pull off Hollywood’s umpteenth clean slate.

In The anthill, which aired on tape on Wednesday, May 29, the closest Smith came to the slaptongate It was when Pablo Motos asked him for some advice for bad times. “The most important thing is to accept the fact that I am a human being and I am not perfect, in that search for perfection is when you lose self-esteem. In recent years I have been forced to accept my flaws, and learn to love myself a little more as an imperfect person,” he responded.

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