Why Will Smith wants to delete ‘After Earth’ from history: “The most painful failure in my career”
For the longest time, Will Smith wasn’t a star familiar with the concept of failure. Over the course of his career, he conquered the worlds of music, television, and movies with relatively few stumbling blocks or setbacks thrown in his path. In fact, in a two-decade timespan in the 1990s and 2000s, Smith only starred in three flops: Wild Wild West, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and Ali, which were released consecutively in 1999, 2000, and 2001.
Aside from that, it was hit after hit for the man formerly known as The Fresh Prince. However, in 2013, he finally tasted defeat again, and this time, the failure was so excruciating that he wanted to delete the movie from history.
In 2015, Smith spoke with Esquire magazine and gave some fascinating insights into the mindset that drove his relentless rise to stardom. The man who became the biggest movie star in Hollywood with movies like Bad Boys, Independence Day, and Men in Black admitted that he has always been guided by an almost pathological need to be number one in everything he does. However, he claims that drive is tied to a traumatic experience he had as a teenager – and the skewed life lesson he gleaned from it.
“I was a guy who, when I was 15, my girlfriend cheated on me,” Smith confessed. “I decided that if I was number one, no woman would ever cheat on me. All I have to do is make sure that no one’s ever better than me, and I’ll have the love that my heart yearns for.”
So, fuelled by a desire to make himself the best in the business, Smith cultivated a career mostly comprised of crowd-pleasing number-one blockbusters. To his shock, though, when he took his biggest gamble and starred in one of these action-packed epics with his son Jaden, it was resoundingly rejected by critics and audiences.
After Earth was a post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure about a father and son struggling to survive the threat of highly evolved animals and an alien that detects fear on an abandoned earth 1,000 years in the future. It was directed by M Night Shyamalan, who was in a strange place in his career where he’d moved away from the original, and it contained mystery dramas at which he had once excelled.
Ultimately, After Earth wound up being neither fish nor fowl, as Shyamalan didn’t suit the blockbuster world, and Smith played a character that denied him his usual charismatic bag of tricks. Even worse, Jaden found himself in the firing line for his own performance, which was condemned as one of the worst examples of Hollywood nepotism in a long time.
“That was the most painful failure in my career,” Smith admitted. “Wild Wild West was less painful than After Earth because my son was involved in After Earth, and I led him into it. That was excruciating.”
If Smith had been able to, he likely would have simply deleted After Earth from his filmography and moved on. Unfortunately, though, this was the real world, and he had to live with his failure. Thankfully, though, he revealed it taught him a lot about himself and helped him grow as a person. “I stopped working for a year and a half,” Smith revealed. “I had to dive into why it was so important for me to have number-one movies.”
Interrogating his feelings about After Earth being a dud was one thing, but when he received a call telling him his father had cancer, the two sides of his life collided and changed his thinking entirely. The mixed-up star realised that approaching his career from the perspective of always needing to be number one wasn’t “a good source of creation.” He also finally understood that tying career success to love was severely flawed, so he reframed how he thought about everything going forward.
“The only thing that will ever satiate that existential thirst is love,” smiled Smith. “I just remember that day I made the shift from wanting to be a winner to wanting to have the most powerful, deep, and beautiful relationships I could possibly have.”
