The Hollywood Reporter – 28.02.2018

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 72 FEBRUARY 28, 2018

The Business

BOOK: COURTESY OF HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT.

Film

Illustration by Læmur

A

s Hollywood became
obsessed with finding
the next big global brand,
Sony Pictures executives would
state that they were as inter-
ested in franchises as anyone else
was. But it clearly wasn’t true.
“People labeled us a relationship
studio,” then-Sony co-chairman
Amy Pascal reflected in 2014.
“We were, and it was our strategy.”
Of Sony’s top 50 movies from
2000 to 2016, more than two-
thirds were “star vehicles,” in
which the talent involved was as
big as or bigger than the movie

Sony and the Swan Song of the A-List Actor

How profitable and powerful were Adam Sandler and Will Smith in the 2000s? Their hit films ‘bought our houses,’ joked execs.

But as audiences turned, the duo became the flashpoint for the collapse of the star market — and, nearly, a studio

novices, and we hadn’t learned

the business,” Lassiter later

reflected. In 2002, they moved

their deal to Sony, which made

Bad Boys and Men in Black and,

most importantly to Smith, 2001’s

Ali. Budget concerns brought Sony

near to killing it but the studio

eventually worked out a compro-

mise with Smith and the highly

respected, but not exactly frugal,

director Michael Mann to make

it for $109 million, still a huge

budget for an R-rated biopic. Ali

grossed only $88 million and lost

Sony money. But it got Smith his

first Oscar nomination and, true

to the Pascal playbook, earned

Sony his loyalty.

title or the franchise. More

than one-third came from just

two people: Will Smith and Adam

Sandler. Movies they starred in

or produced grossed $3.7 billion

from 2000 to 2015, gen-

erating 20 percent of Sony

Pictures’ domestic gross

and 23 percent of its prof-

its. No other studio was

as reliant on just two actors.

Their rise and fall illus-

trate what has happened to

movie stars in Hollywood.

Will Smith found his calling as

the charming hero that America,

and eventually the world, could

root for in big action-adventure

movies beginning with 1995’s

Bad Boys. Then next year, he

starred in Independence Day,

which, at $817 million, remains

his highest-grossing movie

and established him as a world-

wide sensation just when

the international market

was blossoming.

By 1999, with the hits

Men in Black and Enemy of

the State, Smith was

ready for producing. He and

James Lassiter formed

Overbrook Entertainment,

named after their Philadelphia

high school, and signed a three-

year, first-look deal with Universal

Pictures. The duo didn’t get

a single movie made. “We were

BOOK EXCERPT | BEN FRITZ

Ben Fritz is a reporter for The Wall
Street Journal covering Hollywood.