The Business
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 76 FEBRUARY 28, 2018
Excerpted from The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies by Ben Fritz. © 2018 Ben Fritz. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
AXELLE/BAUER-GRIFFIN/FILMMAGICFilmthe unhappy Smith holed up in
his 53-foot-long trailer, which
featured a screening room,
offices for assistants and an all-
granite bathroom, while multiple
screenwriters reworked the
script again and again. The cre-
ative conflicts were so severe that
production was halted for three
months to resolve them. Greenlit
with a budget of $210 million, it
ended up costing $250 million
and barely broke even despite its
hefty $624 million gross.
Smith was hardly deterred,
though. He had something far
bigger in mind. Aware that
“star vehicles” were fading and
talent needed to get involved in
franchises, he developed a proj-
ect called “1000 A.E.” Working
out of a “war room” filled with
concept art, his Overbrook team
envisioned a story set a millen-
nium after the late-21st century
destruction of Earth by envi-
ronmental calamities. Not just a
sci-fi franchise meant to reflect
contemporary concerns, it would
be a “transmedia universe,”
fleshed out in a 294-page “bible.”
Overbrook’s not-too-modest
pitch document detailed plans for
not only the movie and its sequel
but also a television show, an ani-
mated series, webisodes, a video
game, consumer products, theme
park attractions, comic books,
an “in-school education pro-
gram in partnership with NASA”
and “cologne, perfume, toilet-
ries, etc.” Fans would become
so engaged, the pitch document
advised, “it is also essential to
create a stand-alone AE-branded
Social Network.”
Sony executives had mixed
opinions on its commercial poten-
tial, but they needed franchises
and they believed in Smith. Their
biggest concern was how much
Will Smith the movie would have.
Envisioned as a father-son adven-
ture story, the script in some
versions focused entirely on a
young character played by the
star’s son Jaden. Ultimately, Will
Smith appeared in the movie
but spent most of it disabled in a
spaceship, giving advice over a
communicator to his mobile son.ALI | 2001
$44.6MMEN IN BLACK II | 2003
0 50 100 150 200 $250MWill Smith and Sony:
2000-2015BAD BOYS II | 2003
HANCOCK | 2008
LAKEVIEW TERRACE | 2008
THE KARATE KID | 2010
SEVEN POUNDS | 2013
MEN IN BLACK 3 | 2012
AFTER EARTH | 2013
CONCUSSION | 2015
$48.6M
Domestic
InternationalDomestic
InternationalDomestic
InternationalPRODUCED + STARRED IN STARRED IN PRODUCED
of movie this is.” Pascal thought
they should be able to get him for
$10 million, “Let’s try $7.5 mil-
lion,” Lynton told her. “He almost
got us fired with the last movie.”
Lynton lost that battle. Smith
got $10 million, though nothing
close to the 15 gross points that
CAA had asked for. He would take
up to 50 percent of the movie’s
profits only after Sony made at
least $10 million. That didn’t turn
out to be an issue. Released a week
after Star Wars: The Force Awakens
in December 2015, Concussion
barely registered at the box office
— proving once again the power
of franchises over movie stars
— grossing just $49 million and
losing the studio $25 million.
Sandler’s years with Sony also
ended with a whimper in 2015
with Pixels, based on a two-minute
film about classic video game
characters invading Earth. Sony
thought it could become an
action-comedy franchise in the
vein of Ghostbusters and, like After
Earth’s hope, catapult an aging
star into the new world of global
franchises. Looking to keep to
a tight $110 million despite the
extensive visual effects, Sandler
took only $5 million upfront
in exchange for a big cut of the
profits. Pascal promised Lynton
that the movie would be differ-
ent from the typical Sandler fare.
“It’s insanely commercial,” she
assured her boss. “No boob jokes,
no poop jokes.” Critics largely
disagreed, calling it “dimwitted ...
slapdash, casually sexist.” But the
movie grossed just $245 million
and eked out a profit of $10 mil-
lion, not nearly enough to create a
new franchise.
Inside Sony, the conversation
was no longer about how to make
more money with the stars but
how to stop relying on them. “I
think one of the answers to your
question about what replaces
Adam Sandler and Will Smith at
the studio is planting commercial
writer-directors here,” the Sony-
affiliated producer Mike De Luca
told Pascal in 2014. Star power
in Hollywood was fading fast, and
Sandler and Smith would soon be
on the leading edge of actors aban-
doning the studios that no longer
wanted them and signing with a
digital upstart for which they still
had real value: Netflix.$87.7M
$441.8M$273.3MHITCH | 2005 $368.1M
$624.3M$359.1M$243.8M$168.1M
$624MTHE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS | 2006 $307M
Source: Box Office MojoDespite its massive
$624 million box office,
MiB3 barely broke even
as creative differences
ballooned its budget from
$210 million to $250 million.Executives also weren’t thrilled
with Smith’s choice of a direc-
tor, M. Night Shyamalan, whose
once-hot career had cooled.
As they put together marketing
plans for the May 2013 release,
now titled After Earth, Sony execu-
tives realized their best bet was
a con job. “Conceal Will Smith’s
injury,” reads one marketing
document. “It’d be disappointing
to our audience to discover that
he spends the majority of the film
stuck in the ship.” But no amount
of deception could save the film;
it grossed a dismal $61 million in
the U.S. and a somewhat better
$183 million overseas, but the
$149 million production lost more
than $25 million. There were
no sequels, no TV shows and no
video games. The failure was dev-
astating to Smith, who not only
acted in and produced the movie
but also got his first screenwrit-
ing credit.
In the wake of After Earth
and That’s My Boy, the golden age
for Smith and Sandler at Sony
was over. As was happening to
production companies all around
Hollywood, the annual overhead
for Overbrook and Happy Madison
was slashed in half, to about
$2 million each. And “the corpo-
rate jet wasn’t available so much
anymore,” said a person close
to Sandler.
Following their flops, Sandler
and Smith each had only one
live-action movie left at Sony
before they could start searching
for more welcoming backers
elsewhere. Pascal’s boss, Sony
Pictures chairman Michael
Lynton, thought that Concussion,
about a doctor who discovers the
danger of brain injuries to NFL
players, should be made at a very
low cost with a little-known star.
Pascal believed it was the per-
fect movie to get “back on track”
with Smith, an inspirational
drama starring one of the world’s
biggest movie stars along the
lines of his megahit The Pursuit
of Happyness. But there was a
problem. Smith’s agents at CAA
initially wanted $15 million
against 15 percent of the gross —
a cut from Smith’s usual quote
but still a huge number for such
a small movie. “I don’t know
what to do with that,” Pascal told
Lassiter. “You know what kind