Why did Will Smith make ‘Wild Wild West’ instead of ‘The Matrix’?
Will Smith has made his fair share of poor decisions over the years, particularly that one at the Oscars, but there was one early in his career as a movie star that still rankles. In 1997, the Wachowski siblings approached him with an offer that, in retrospect, he really should have accepted: to play Neo in their film The Matrix. Smith turned it down, Keanu Reeves did not, and the rest is history.
The Matrix is one of the most iconic movies of the ‘90s, and it turned Reeves into an even bigger star than he had been before. The fact that acting wasn’t his strong suit didn’t matter. As Neo, he spent most of his time performing impressive martial arts, being charismatic, and looking pensive/confused (the same facial expression). He excelled. It’s hard to imagine anyone else knocking it out of the park like that, especially Smith, who is prone to hamming up every line, but it’s no surprise that the Fresh Prince star regretted his decision.
In a video on his YouTube channel from 2019, Smith explained that the offer came shortly after he had made two alien movies, Independence Day and Men in Black. The Wachowskis had a limited track record at the time, having only made the neo noir Bound, so Smith was wary from the outset. “They came in, and they made a pitch for The Matrix, and as it turns out, they were geniuses,” he remembered. “But there’s a fine line in a pitch meeting between genius and what I experienced in the meeting.”
He tried to recall the pitch verbatim, saying that the siblings tried to describe what they would be trying to achieve visually. “Imagine if you could stop jumping in the middle of the jump,” he remembered them saying, “But then, people could see around you, 360 while you’re jumping…”
“So I made Wild Wild West,” he concluded. If you have never heard of that film, let alone watched it, that is because it is very, very bad and not worth your time. Smith and Kevin Kline play special agents during the Civil War who are tasked with protecting the president from a rogue scientist, but it’s much weirder than it sounds. A few months after The Matrix raked in $467 million at the box office, Wild Wild West crashed and burned.
“I’m not proud of it,” Smith admitted, though he also acknowledged that his decision to make it was better for everyone in the end. “I probably would’ve messed The Matrix up,” he said. “I would’ve ruined it. I did ya’ll a favour.”
Who was originally supposed to play Jim West?
If Smith had agreed to star in The Matrix, it would have left the part of Jim West in Wild Wild West up for grabs. As it turns out, the part had already been allocated long before Smith snapped it up. The project had initially been slated to go ahead in the early ‘90s with Mel Gibson in the lead and Richard Donner directing. However, that duo dropped out to work on the film Maverick instead.
Several years later, Tom Cruise was allegedly attached, though that seems pretty hard to believe, given how the movie turned out. For a man with an obsessive attention to detail, the pure chaos of Wild Wild West would surely have driven him off the rails. He opted to make Mission: Impossible instead, and the role was unclaimed again, unfortunately for Smith.
