Over the past year, Will Smith has managed to revive his status as a box office draw thanks to the enormous hauls from Bad Boys for Life. Both movies, riding a wave of 1990s nostalgia, sured all expectations and scored some of the biggest opening weekends ever for a Will Smith movie. It's an impressive feat for an actor who's been consistently headlining movies for 24 years now. However, during his time as a movie star, Smith hasn't exclusively seen box office hits. In fact, directly prior to Aladdin, Smith was on a bit of a box office cold streak.
Granted, in the span of his career, Smith has had plenty of hits to balance out the recent misses. In fact, for his first decade as a movie star, he was regularly seen as a box office juggernaut. Save for the occasional I, Robot. However, Smith's streak of box office hits came to a sudden close in December 2008 thanks to the drama Seven Pounds. After that underperforming title, he proceeded to take a 4-year-long hiatus from acting.
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Smith's box office cold streak began shortly after he came back from that hiatus. While his first title back, After Earth was a costly dud that ended up making less, domestically, than Seven Pounds. But now, several years later, Smith has returned to being a box office star, at least to some extent. Movies like Bad Boys for Life and Aladdin have shown that, though it's fair to say that those movies' box office also did well because of them being a sequel and remake, respectively. Regardless, the fact that they did so well is a testament to Smith still being a major star.
Interestingly, while there have been a handful of darker Smith projects (namelySuicide Squad. That film's success was likely more attributable to the DC Comics brand name than Smith alone, but it still showed he could headline a lucrative project in the modern age.
That's a truth that's been heavily reinforced over the last year thanks to the wildly successful box office runs of Aladdin and Bad Boys for Life, both of which were more lighthearted titles featuring a comical and charming Will Smith that audiences like to see. In between those successful titles, though, Smith headlined the box office dud Gemini Man. That Ang Lee movie's grim marketing, placing an emphasis on a cold, stiff version of Smith, reinforced what kind of cinema audiences like to exclusively see this movie star in. As long as Smith keeps on starring in films like Aladdin and Bad Boys for Life, his status as a box office star will likely keep enduring for years to come.
