The movie Will Smith wanted to shut down: “I’ve just ruined my career”
Will Smith has made a Hollywood career out of being the most charismatic guy in the room. He has applied that charisma to action movies, comedies, dramas, superhero films, and even the occasional animated epic. However, while he has made a few romantic movies, he’s only once made a genuine, honest-to-goodness romcom – and it’s one of his most beloved films. This is why it may shock fans to learn that he was so unsure about the project that he tried to get it shut down a mere three days before production was scheduled to begin.
This particular tale of heartbreak and triumph began with a director named Andy Tennant, who was struggling to set up his next project after the success of 2002’s Sweet Home Alabama. Despite that movie raking in cash at the box office, when his next potential movie was pitched to Jennifer Aniston, she passed on it. Tennant was gutted – until he ran into a Columbia Pictures executive at the gym who assured him, “I’m going to send you a script tonight. Read it.”
The script was The Last First Kiss, a modern romcom about a professional matchmaker who makes his living teaching lonely men how to seduce women. It was written by Kevin Bisch, and even though the script altered shape across the production process and changed its title to Hitch, the core concept stayed the same – as did the line, “No matter who, what, when, a man can sweep any woman off her feet; he just needs the right broom.”
At this time, Smith was keeping an eagle eye out for opportunities to continue developing his star persona on a worldwide scale. He knew romcoms played well overseas but had supposedly been told by shortsighted studio executives that this didn’t apply to romcoms with Black leads. Naturally, someone like Smith is going to see this offensive outlook as a challenge, and Tennant admitted to Business Insider, “That was the reason why Will wanted to do it. He wanted to break that barrier.”
Unfortunately for Tennant, even though he now had a go-picture with an A-list star front and centre, he had no idea he was setting himself up for a hellish pre-production. From the start, he and Smith clashed creatively, with Tennant describing their collaboration as a “battle” and admitting, “The movie I wanted to make and the movie Will wanted to make – neither one of those movies is as good as the movie we made together.”
“I was more afraid of Will making that version of the movie than I was about them firing me.”
ANDY TENNANT
Tennant noted that Smith’s wife, Jada, was his saving grace, as she saw the tone of the film the same way he did. However, he and his star continued to be in conflict. At the core of the matter, Tennant “didn’t want cheap jokes” in the movie, but he felt Smith didn’t trust him on this instinct. “There was a time during prep when I was pushing back,” the director confessed. “A lot of crazy shit that was happening.”
At one point, Smith brought a new draft of the script to the table, which proved to be a breaking point for Tennant. In fact, he hated it so much that he was willing to be sacked over it. “I finally told the studio that I was more afraid of Will making that version of the movie than I was about them firing me,” Tennant claimed. “Because I knew they were right on the edge of firing me before we even began shooting.”
Tennant must have kicked up enough of a fuss with this ultimatum that it finally convinced Smith to listen to him, because that egregious script draft was abandoned. The tumult was still there, though, and it led to a potentially disastrous situation only days before the shoot was supposed to start.
Luckily, Smith was talked into forging ahead with the scheduled shoot. Maybe Tennant managed to get through to him, but it’s more likely that an angry executive made him painfully aware of how many millions the studio would haemorrhage should production shut down so close to the start date.
Either way, once the movie actually began filming, Tennant claimed, “It was a bunch of good creative people doing the best they could.” Having said that, when it wrapped, he was convinced that he’d made a dud. He was so convinced, in fact, that he called his wife and told her: “I’ve just ruined my career, and I’ve ruined Will Smith’s career.”
Of course, the worried director couldn’t have been any more wrong. Hitch was an enormous success, critically and commercially, and it’s one of Smith’s most fondly remembered films to this day. It just goes to show that, sometimes, making movies can be so confusing that no one has any idea what’s going to turn out well – not the writer, not the director, and certainly not the star.
