The $466m role Brad Pitt and Will Smith turned down: “As it turns out, they’re geniuses”
Brad Pitt once joked that if he were to speak about every great movie he turned down the chance to star in, he’d need a two-night show to fit them all in. In that same boat, Will Smith has publicly admitted to feeling like an idiot for saying no to certain projects, despite his career being chock-full of hits anyway.
For both of these A-list icons, there’s still one film that hangs over them. A $466 million-smashing blockbuster that didn’t just pack out cinemas but genuinely shifted Hollywood on its axis. Overnight it went from being a hit movie to a full-blown cultural moment, changing how people thought about reality itself while dazzling them with visuals that felt lightyears ahead.
Pitt and Smith probably watched on with horror as The Matrix became the kind of ‘out of nowhere’ sleeper hit that comes along once every blue moon. As they witnessed Keanu Reeves looking like the coolest motherfucker who ever lived, kung-fu kicking, shooting, and defying gravity to his heart’s content, the sinking feeling in the pits of their stomachs must have been one for the ages. After all, they both let the part of Thomas ‘Neo’ Anderson, the saviour of humankind from the villainous machines that have enslaved the world, slip through their fingers.
However, before condemning Pitt and Smith for their abysmal judgment, it’s worth noting that The Matrix was far from a sure thing when it was pitched to them. In fact, it was such an out-there concept, from a pair of unknown filmmakers, that few decision-makers in Hollywood fully understood it.
Even producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, a development executive for Warner Bros in the late ‘90s, could barely make heads or tails of the Wachowski siblings’ script, a martial arts/science-fiction hybrid about machines turning human beings into living batteries by keeping their brains placated with a simulation of reality known as ‘the Matrix’.
All Di Bonaventura knew was that the Wachowskis were passionate as hell about their idea, and their pitch, involving one sibling explaining the story while the other made sound effects, was unique, to say the least. They also had storyboards and worldbuilding designs by comic book artists Steve Skroce and Geoff Darrow to show the execs, and Di Bonaventura was left with the feeling that this was something very, very special, even if he still couldn’t quite wrap his head around it.
Unfortunately for Smith, when he was presented with this very pitch from a couple of filmmakers who only had one feature under their belt (1996’s lesbian crime noir Bound), he was far from convinced. He didn’t quite grasp the script and hoped the pitch would sell him on the project, but the Wachowskis’ antics simply baffled him even further.
“As it turns out, they’re geniuses,” he later admitted with a laugh, “but there’s a fine line in a pitch meeting between genius and what I experienced in the meeting.”
To be fair to Smith, there was also another factor at play in his dismissal of The Matrix. He had just come off making Independence Day and Men in Black in succession, and was wary of being labelled “the alien movie guy.” So, he said no thanks to the project and made the infamous Wild Wild West instead, a bizarre steampunk western that fizzled at the box office and was hated by audiences. Smith later confessed he was “not proud of” his decision, but hey, at least the world was treated to his hilarious tie-in single, in which he rapped excitedly about the “wicky wicky Wild Wild West”.
As for Pitt, he admitted in 2020 that he passed on Neo while quipping, “I took the red pill.”
It was a decent attempt at humour, even if he got his pill colours wrong; the blue pill is the one that allows a person to ignore the truth and return to their normal life. Pitt was much less regretful than Smith about losing out on a modern classic, though, although it surely frustrates him from time to time.
He mused, “I come from a place, maybe it’s my upbringing: if I didn’t get it, then it wasn’t mine.”
