Those statistics, and his swift rise to superstardom, are all the more extraordinary given the color of Smith’s skin (of particular significance in terms of his marketability overseas), and given that Independence Day was released amid the turmoil of mid-’90s race relations (for an illustrative portrait of just how tumultuous, check out the recent ESPN documentary O.J.: Made in America). He quickly, in fact, established himself as one of Hollywood’s biggest box-office earners, the only actor, per the Hollywood Reporter in 2013, to have eight consecutive films gross more than $100 million domestically, and 10 gross more than $150 million internationally. And it would complicate marketing.”īut in the months following the film’s release, Smith became exactly what he had been hired not to be: a major movie star. We didn’t need a movie star to make it more expensive.
As Emmerich told The New York Times in 1996, “One of the points we made was that we didn’t want this to be a movie-star movie. Independence Day wasn’t supposed to be a Will Smith vehicle. As The Atlantic suggested, it’s a perfect case study in just how much the movie industry has changed in the past two decades, and also an occasion to consider Smith, the actor once indelibly associated with the Fourth of July mega-blockbuster, and now curiously (if shrewdly) absent from the long-awaited sequel to the movie that made him a star. But Resurgence is still worth noting (briefly). A comparatively (and only comparatively) kind New York Times review still cited a “lackluster, at times abysmal” script and lamented the absence of a “charismatic star who could lift a movie as effortlessly as Will Smith did in the first feature.”Ĭlearly you’ve made the right decision about how not to spend the anniversary of our country’s birth. “Disposable and shockingly inept,” censured Entertainment Weekly, which awarded the film a grade of F. “It’s a non-movie, an insult to the blockbuster genre, and should stand only as a perfect example of Hollywood’s more glaring deficiencies as an industry,” excoriated The Atlantic. The reviews for director Roland Emmerich’s latest fiasco, released the third week of June, have been scathing. Today we celebrate our Independence Day, and chances are that you, like me, are not headed to see Independence Day: Resurgence.