will smith
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Will Smith is one of the most recognizable celebrities of his era and much of his fame was earned during his days as an actor on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, produced by Quincy Jones. Taking to social media, Will Smith gave a loving tribute to the late Quincy Jones, naming the influential producer as a “mentor.”
On Instagram, Will Smith, 56, posted a photo of him and Quincy Jones on the set of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, with Jones flashing a big smile and pointing at the rapper-turned-actor. In a brief but emotionally packed message, Smith showered Jones with adoration.
From IG:
Quincy Jones is the true definition of a Mentor, a Father and a Friend. He pointed me toward the greatest parts of myself. He defended me. He nurtured me. He encouraged me. He inspired me. He checked me when he needed to. He let me use his wings until mine were strong enough to fly.
Among Jones’ many achievements, he served as an executive producer for the hit sitcom that made Smith a star and also appeared in an episode from the show’s fourth season. Along with music production, Jones had a hand in composing music for major films and created VIBE magazine among other creative endeavors.
Quincy Jones passed at the age of 91 this past Sunday (November 3).
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Photo: Getty
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Source: Koichi Kamoshida / Getty / iRobot / Elon Musk
Elon Musk gets plenty of praise for his “technical prowess,” but one person, Alex Proyas, doesn’t share those sentiments.
Last week in Burbank, California, the Tesla Chief and terrible owner of X, formerly Twitter, unveiled his company’s new Optimus robots and self-driving vehicles at an event interestingly titled “We Robot.”
Like many on X, Aley Proyas, the director of the 2004 blockbuster film I Robot, believed Musk jacked the designs from his movie.
“Hey Elon,” Proyas wrote on X, “Can I have my designs back, please?” The message was accompanied by a series of stills from the film, side-by-side with photos of Musk’s latest designs.
Musk, who doesn’t hesitate to respond when he’s called on his platform, has yet to respond to Proyas’ claims, but that didn’t stop his delusional fans from putting on their capes to defend the billionaire.
“Be honored. What you did with CGI and a green screen, @elonmusk did in reality,” one person wrote in response to Proyas’ claims.
Another glazer wrote, “you feel you inspired the future yet you’re trying to dunk on the person who made it a reality.”
This was not the first time Musk had shown off the Optimus robot; it debuted in 2022, the same year he reluctantly bought Twitter for $44 billion before stupidly renaming it to X.
Musk’s reputation as the real-life Tony Stark has since taken a well-deserved hit, and now he has become “Dark MAGA,” whatever that means.
Word on the tech streets is that humans partly controlled the robots at “We Work.” Following the event, Tesla stock took a hit, dropping by nearly 9%.
Welp.
You can hit the gallery below for more reactions.
4. Do you really?
5. Yes, he’s definitely watched it.
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Source: KAZUHIRO NOGI / Getty / Will Smith / Michael Bay
It only took 30 years, but Will Smith and Michael Bay are finally working together again.
Spotted on Variety and first reported by Deadline, Will Smith and Michael Bay will reunite for the upcoming Netflix action film Fast and Loose.
According to the website, Fast and Loose will follow a man, played by Smith, who wakes up in Tijuana with no memories. As he works to regain his memory, he learns that he has been living a double life as a crime kingpin and an undercover CIA agent.
The upcoming project marks the first time Smith and Bay have worked together since 1995’s box office blockbuster Bad Boys, which also starred Martin Lawrence and went on to spawn three successful sequels.
Speaking of Lawrence, the actor/comedian joked on X, formerly Twitter, “Don’t forget about ya boy.”
Variety notes that Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, Chris Bremner, and Eric Pearson will work on the script with Smith, Kelly McCormick, and David Leitch for 87North, serving as producers.
Jon Mone and Ryan Shimazaki are in negotiations to produce for Westbrook Studios.
Since Bad Boys, Smith has become one of Hollywood’s biggest names. He won an Acadmey Award for his portrayal of Richard Williams in King Richard and starred in Apple’s Emancipation in 2022. He is set to star in the long-awaited sequel to I Am Legend alongside Michael B. Jordan and Sony Pictures’ sci-fi thriller Resistor.
Michael Bay has been busy blowing things up on screen in blockbuster Transformers live-action films and has sat in the director’s chair for other high-action films like Pearl Harbor and Ambulance.
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Source: Wagner Meier / Getty
Apparently, actor Will Smith has a flatulence problem that is so bad his farts will slap you in the face. (I should have apologized in advance for making that inevitable joke. Please do not unsubscribe.)
According to Variety, Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld made a recent appearance on the Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa podcast, where he recalled an incident that happened during the filming of the 1997 action comedy staring Smith and renowned actor Tommy Lee Jones in which the former let one rip that smelled so bad and was so strong the entire set had to be evacuated “for about three hours.”
From Variety:
According to Sonnenfeld, the incident occurred during the scene in which Smith and Jones are in a transforming car that travels at hyper speeds and flips over. In order to film the sequence, the two actors had to be “hermetically sealed” in the pod that was being used for the car.
“There are locks to prevent it from opening and falling,” Sonnenfeld said. “I say, ‘Roll camera.’ And I hear Will Smith go, ‘Oh Jesus, so sorry. Tommy, so sorry. Baz, get the ladder.’ And you hear Tommy saying, ‘That’s fine, Will. No worries, Will. Don’t worry, Will.’ Anyway, I don’t know what’s gone on, right?”
“So we race the ladder over. Yeah, Tommy reaches his leg out as the ladder is coming over, races down the stairs. And what happened was, Will Smith is a farter,” the director continued. “It’s just some people are. And you really don’t want to be inside a very small hermetically sealed space with a Will Smith fart. You don’t even want to be sitting next to him at the Disney ranch.”
Sonnenfeld concluded, “We evacuated the stage for about three hours. And that’s incredible. No, he’s, you know, a lovely guy. Just, he farts. Some do, some don’t.”
Obviously, we should all be disappointed in the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air actor. I mean, come on. All of the drama and turmoil that resulted from Smith slapping Chris Rock on the Oscars stage in 2022 over a joke Rock made about Jada Pinkett Smith — and you’re telling me it could all have been avoided if he simply marched up to Chris and farted in his face?
Guys, that would have been comedy GOLD!
Then again, if Smith’s farts are as bad as Sonnenfeld says they are, maybe Rock should count himself lucky.
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Will Smith and his slow but steady return to public life after the stirring Oscars incident has largely been received well by fans and the media and now there is a new development. Will Smith aka the Fresh Prince, will make a return to music by performing a new song at the 2024 BET Awards this coming weekend.
Details are scant but as Variety reports, Will Smith will deliver a new track to the masses but there isn’t much known about the sound or direction. Further, it isn’t known if DJ Jazzy Jeff will be on the 1s and 2s behind him as he hits the stages.
With the recent success of Bad Boys: Ride or Die and a run of press tours in support of the movie, Smith seems to be at ease with being back in the spotlight although the topic of the Chris Rock slap will always hover over him. Variety added in its post that Smith is reportedly working on new music, and mentioned Smith appearing alongside J Balvin at Coachella earlier this year.
The 2024 BET Awards will air live on Sunday, June 30 at 8 PM ET/PT. Taraji P. Henson will resume hosting duties and Usher will be given the Lifetime Achievement BET Award.
Learn more about the 2024 BET Awards here.
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Photo: Getty
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Source: Michael Tullberg / Getty
Welp, apparently, Stephen A. Smith isn’t the only one who is still salty about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock and having the audacity to still be enjoying a successful acting career two years later.
Actor Rob Schneider is also really upset about Smith and his return to Hollywood glory, which came with his massively successful latest addition to the Bad Boys franchise with Martin Lawrence. Schneider—who is best known for being the guy literally no one would know if Adam Sandler hadn’t kept putting him in movies—recently made an appearance on the Kyle & Jackie O morning show where he had some choice words for the Fresh Prince, who was probably somewhere minding his own business, or joining much of the rest of the world in asking, “Who TF is Rob Schneider?”
“Will Smith is a twat,” Schneider said. “Will Smith has been hiding the fact of who he really is and it was exposed that night — that he’s really an a*shole.” (Side note: For those who were wondering, “twat” is one of those words Black people don’t really get offended by because only white people use the term. See also the C-word. These are just words we don’t say or come across often, which makes them pretty corny. Maye this is why they’d rather just call us the N-word.)
“Will is a douchebag,” Schneider went on to say. (Also, “douchebag.” That’s another one we just don’t use.) “The thing is, that’s how politically correct that Academy is, that they were so cowardly — because if I would’ve done that, they would’ve hauled me out to prison. They were so worried about being racist, they were like, ‘We can’t be.’”
“It’s violence, is what it is,” he continued. “The color of your skin, or your religion, doesn’t matter — if you commit a crime in front of other people, you get hauled out of there.”
Apparently, the Deuce Bigalow actor (oh yeah—he was in that movie) is another aggrieved and delusional white man who thinks being Black is an advantage for people accused of violence. This shouldn’t be a surprise considering Schneider is an anti-woke conservative who likely has a larger issue with a Black actor slapping another Black actor and bouncing back from it than he does a demonstrably bigoted presidential candidate who is looking for a second term after he caused a riot at the U.S. Capitol after trying to cancel democracy through provably false voter fraud propaganda.
It’s unclear what kind of response Schneider was hoping for by force-feeding us his opinion on Will Smith, but all he succeeded in doing was getting the whole internet to tell him he’s a talentless has-been who is jealous of Will because he’s never been anywhere near the vicinity of his relevance and would have never been relevant at all if Sandler hadn’t carried him on his back for his entire career.
Let’s take a look at some of these brutal reactions on X:
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Yeah, Schneider should have just sat there and ate his food. Like—who even are you, bro?
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Source: Kevork Djansezian / Getty
Stephen A. Smith promised us that he would have more commentary regarding his insistence that Will Smith still owes “the Black community” an “explanation” for slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars in 2022. Now that he has heard the response of the Black community, most of whom told him to speak for himself and that Will doesn’t owe us anything, he is sharing those thoughts, but it really isn’t helping his case.
Seriously, maybe he should have kept this in the drafts.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get over what Will Smith did to Chris Rock,” Smith began. “But that doesn’t mean I have to, and it doesn’t give me a license to negatively impact Will Smith.”
Now, Smith could have stopped right there, and all would have been fine. After all, it’s OK that he still hasn’t gotten over it, and it’s nice that he acknowledged that his personal inability to get over it doesn’t give him “license to negatively impact” Will, whose latest Bad Boys film has proven to be massively successful despite the controversy surrounding the Fresh Prince of Belair actor. (Although, really, Strephen does have every right to say what he has to say about Will regardless of whether or not it “negatively impacts” him, as we all have a right to our opinions.) But Where the sports analyst loses me is when he implies that Will owes Black people a special apology due to the impact of white racism.
“It was a blemish on all of us because I know how much white America reveres Will Smith and the thinking along the lines in my mind was, ‘Hell, if he did that, what would the rest of us do?’” Smith went on to to say after suggesting that the slap may have prevented Black director Antoine Fuqua from receiving an Oscar for Emancipation. “There are certain things that happen in the lives of an individual where those incidences are used as a license to castigate the rest of us.”
So, it appears that Stephen A. Smith isn’t so much bothered by what Will did to another Black man as much as he is afraid of the optics of it, which is to say he’s in fear of the white gaze. In Smith’s initial remarks, he speculated that Will “wouldn’t have smacked Ricky Gervais, Bill Maher, Bill Burr or a host of others.” While that may or may not be true, it’s definitely true that if Ricky Gervais had slapped Bill Maher on the Oscars stage, we wouldn’t be having a conversation about how it might negatively affect the careers of other white actors, comedians and directors. That’s not even a thought that would come up because that logic simply doesn’t apply to white people of any profession.
But Smith isn’t lecturing white people for allowing this glaring double standard to persist, and he certainly isn’t lecturing the myriad of white comedians and media personalities who went full fire and brimstone on Will after the slap but never have that same energy in response to the hideous anti-social behavior displayed by their fellow Caucasian celebrities. Instead, Stephen A. Smith is lecturing Will Smith about what he owes Black people for exacerbating the anti-Black racism of white people—much like Chris Rock did when he declared at the end of his “Selective Outrage” comedy special: “I got parents, and you know what my parents taught me: Don’t fight in front of white people.”
Besides the fact that Stephen (and probably Rock as well) is mad at the wrong thing and possibly the wrong person, maybe he should be dealing with his feelings about Will, the slap and his fear of the white gaze by working them out with a therapist instead of on national television.
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Bad Boys: Ride or Die, the fourth film in the Bad Boys franchise starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, proved that audiences are still locked in with the pair. As a result, fans are saluting Will Smith for bouncing back from the shocking Oscars slap incident with many saying they never intended to abandon him.
Bad Boys: Ride or Die opened to $56 million in box office sales in the United States and an additional $48.6 million globally, bringing the total haul to $104.6 million, according to a report from Variety.
There have been rumblings of the lack of huge hits at the theater. Yet, it appears that by most metrics, the buddy-cop action flick is a huge success and proved that audiences have stuck by Will Smith. While Hollywood seemed set on leaving him behind after he slapped Chris Rock during the live broadcast of the Oscars two years ago, fans are rallying around him like never before.
The film also highlights the comedic and acting talents of Martin Lawrence, who has to continually assure audiences that he’s in good health while proving he’s still got great onscreen chemistry with Smith. Some reports online suggest that Lawrence, playing the straight man, stole many of the scenes.
Smith also witnessed the warm embrace of his fans in person after secretly attending a premiere of Bad Boys: Ride or Die and revealing to attendees he was in the audience with them the entire time. If the early success of the film isn’t an indicator that fans are back on the side of Will Smith, the interactions with those excited fans certainly stand as confirmation.
On Twitter, fans are praising the success of Bad Boys: Ride or Die and Will Smith. Check out the reactions below.
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Photo: Manny Hernandez / Getty
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Stephen A. Smith offered his viewpoints on Will Smith just as the celebrated actor is enjoying some success due to the latest film in the Bad Boys franchise going number over the weekend. Stephen A. Smith, using his podcast platform, believes that Will Smith should address the Black community regarding the slapping incident involving Chris Rock at the Oscars, although it appears the community in question still loves The Fresh Prince.
Via an X reply from The Art of Dialogue page, a clip of Stephen A. Smith went wide with the host opening the clip saying that forgiveness aside, Will owes the Black community an explanation. Smith did go on to add that he doesn’t harbor any hatred towards the Philadelphia native and even said that conversations with Charlie Mack, a longtime friend of the rapper and actor, helped him see the light.
That said, Smith is committed to the idea that enough wasn’t done to ease the minds of the community and that Chris Rock is owed more than what he’s received. As most would know, apologies have long been issued for the Oscars slap, which were inspired by Rock making jokes about Jada Pinkett-Smith’s appearance.
It has been a long climb back to glory for Smith after largely staying out of the public eye before resurfacing and allowing himself to provide content and entertainment to his legion of fans. Alongside Martin Lawrence, the success of Bad Boys: Ride or Die has inspired some people to say it deserves the same sequel-heavy treatment as the Fast & Furious franchise.
Check out the video from Stephen A. Smith regarding the Chris Rock Oscars incident, along with reaction to this latest clip and more, below.
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2. He’s probably not the only person that feels this way but point made.
13. Now that needs addressing.
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Source: Arturo Holmes / Getty
It looks like Will Smith is officially out of the doghouse as far as fans are concerned. Years after alienating millions of his supporters for slapping Chris Rock, Smith is once again feeling the love and adoration whenever he takes the stage these days.
His latest surprise appearance came courtesy of J Balvin during his set at Coachella Sunday night (April 14) and much to the delight of the crowd, Will Smith burst on the scene in his Men In Black attire and performed the title track from the smash 1997 film. Why that song was chosen is anyone’s guess. Smith does have a few other songs that people would’ve grooved to like “Welcome To Miami,” Summertime” or even “Gettin’ Jiggy With It,” but nah, they decided “Men In Black” was the one.
According to Variety, the song turned out to be the right choice as not only did the crowd approve, but also appreciated the entire theme that overtook the stage for the surprise cameo.
Per Variety:
The appearance was brief but memorable, capping a UFO-themed set and concluding with Balvin being dragged off by black-suit-clad dancers as Smith pulled out a “Neuralyzer,” the famous memory-eraser device from the film.
Balvin returned for another song, however, and rocked energetically through a rousing version of his hit “In Da Ghetto” with his troupe of dancers, who were clad in comically stereotypical alien costumes, green with big black eyes.
Balvin’s concerts are always heavily thematic, and the interstellar theme was present throughout. It opened with a mock-1950s newsreel about an alien invasion (in English, with Spanish subtitles), eventually revealing that the alien was… Balvin, who then arose on a platform from beneath the stage, underneath a giant mock-UFO that looked like a cross between the evil spaceship in the film “Nope,” a pointer from a Ouija board and a cushioned toilet seat.
Who knew J Balvin was such a big Men In Black fan? We sure didn’t. Either way it was cool to see Will Smith back in his bag and getting love from the crowd. Whether or not that love once again extends to Chris Rock is anyone’s guess, but we wouldn’t bet on it.
Check out Will Smith’s performance at Coachella, and let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.