by Ben Fritz
Always a hard worker, with a Tony Robbins–esque belief that if he focused on his goals, he could achieve anything, Smith decided, “I want to be the biggest movie star in the world.” Working with his business partner James Lassiter, DJ Jazzy Jeff ’s former manager, Smith focused on what the highest-grossing movies had in common to see what he could apply to his own choices—a habit he would continue throughout his career.
His first leading role was in Six Degrees of Separation, a low-grossing adaptation of a Broadway play perhaps remembered best for Smith’s homophobic refusal to kiss another man, forcing the director to imply their lip-locking by filming the back of Smith’s head. Soon after, though, he found his true calling: as the charming hero that America, and eventually the world, could root for in big action-adventure movies. Smith’s evolution to movie star started in 1995, with the buddy cop movie Bad Boys, and quickly hit an apex in 1996 with Independence Day, which, at $817 million, remains his highest-grossing movie and established him as a worldwide sensation at just the time when the international market was blossoming. Smith also proved he was immune to the conventional industry wisdom that foreigners wouldn’t embrace an African American movie star.
By 1999, with the hits Men in Black and Enemy of the State under his belt, Will Smith was ready for producing. This move, which most successful stars ultimately make, would allow him to develop his own material and give him more creative control, rather than just perform in other people’s movies. He and Lassiter formed Overbrook Entertainment, named after the high school they both attended, and signed a three-year first-look deal with Universal Pictures.
To borrow a box-office term, the deal was a bomb. The duo didn’t get a single movie made at Universal. “The truth of the matter is, we were novices, and we hadn’t learned the business,” Lassiter later reflected. “We hadn’t learned what it really means to produce movies.”
In 2002, they moved their deal to Sony, the studio that made Bad Boys and Men in Black and, most important to Smith, 2001’s Ali. Budget concerns brought Pascal and her boss at the time, John Calley, near to killing this boxing biopic. But they eventually worked out a compromise with Smith and the Oscar-nominated, highly respected, but not exactly frugal director Michael Mann to make it for $109 million, still a huge budget for an R-rated biopic. It grossed only $88 million and lost Sony money. But it earned Smith his first Oscar nomination and, true to the Pascal playbook, endeared him to the studio and its motion picture chief, who was willing to take risks for the talent she adored.
“Home is a place where you feel completely comfortable, and you get unconditional support, and Columbia Pictures has been that place to us for many years,” Smith and Lassiter declared as they signed the deal. Pascal had proved her loyalty to them “through deeds, not words.”
At Sony, Smith joined another former TV star whom Pascal had lured to America’s most important and highest-paying form of pop culture at the time—the movies.
Comedy Wunderkind
Adam Sandler was a standup comedian from New Hampshire who, after being discovered by Dennis Miller, made it onto Saturday Night Live as a writer and then a performer. While he earned fans for characters like Opera Man and Canteen Boy and his “Chanukah Song,” he did not seem destined for stardom in the way that his contemporaries Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, and Mike Myers were. He was charming, in a low-key and goofy way, but he seemed like a six-year-old in a grown man’s body.
As he transitioned to movies, Sandler’s first few efforts weren’t breakout hits. Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore, both built around his man-child persona, grossed only $26 million and $39 million, respectively. But they were cult favorites, watched over and over on DVD and cable by frat boys and stoners.
In 1998, Sandler proved he could actually appeal to a broad audience as a romantic lead, playing a lovable loser who woos Drew Barrymore away from a rich douchebag in The Wedding Singer. Then later that year, his man-child persona found a huge audience with The Waterboy, which grossed a jaw-dropping $186 million. It was the fifth-highest-grossing film of the year and the most successful sports comedy ever, establishing Sandler as a major movie star.
Amy Pascal fell hard for Sandler after seeing him in The Wedding Singer. So when Chris Farley, who was set to star in a Sony comedy as an underachieving toll collector, suddenly died, she turned to Sandler. Big Daddy was another monster hit, grossing $235 million worldwide, and it turned Sony into a home for the star’s new company, Happy Madison Productions.
Unlike Smith, Sandler didn’t have grand designs for his career or carefully plotted strategies for his company. He was a smart but easygoing schlub who worked hard for his family and had no pretensions about who he was and why his fans loved him. Realizing early in his career that newspaper critics and reporters looked down on his work, Sandler simply refused to talk to them. The only publicity he would do for his films was on TV, goofing around with fellow comics like David Letterman and Jay Leno on late-night talk shows.
“He wasn’t fancy and he wasn’t a dinner-party conversation guy. He was more about the money,” said a person close to the star.
Being prolific was the name of the game for Adam Sandler. Between 2000 and 2015, he starred in twenty-four movies and produced another thirteen that he didn’t appear in. Sandler starred in at least one crude comedy almost every year to satisfy his fan base and studios. But he wasn’t afraid to take risks either, starring in a number of ambitious dramas from respected directors, such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, James L. Brooks’s Spanglish, and Judd Apatow’s Funny People.
Smith, meanwhile, was more strategic and deliberative in his choices. He starred in fifteen films during the same period that Sandler made twenty-four, and at one point took a four-year break. He produced seven movies that he didn’t star in.
Both enjoyed unmatched success throughout the 2000s. After Pascal supported him in Ali, Smith starred in two sequels that she badly wanted, Men in Black II and Bad Boys II. And if they weren’t as profitable as they should have been because the studio overspent, that was hardly his fault. He then proved his romantic-comedy bona fides with Hitch, his ability to draw big audiences to an inspirational drama with The Pursuit of Happyness, and his appeal in an original superhero film with Hancock.
Sandler, meanwhile, proved can’t-miss in one dumb but endearing comedy after another. Mr. Deeds, Anger Management, 50 First Dates, The Longest Yard, Click, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Grown Ups, and Just Go with It all grossed more than $170 million worldwide.
Sony paid both stars handsomely for their consistent success: $20 million against 20 percent of the gross receipts, whichever was higher, was their standard compensation. They also received as much as $5 million against 5 percent for their production companies, where they employed family and friends. Sony also provided Happy Madison and Overbrook with a generous overhead to cover expenses—worth about $4 million per year. To top it off, Sandler and Smith enjoyed the perks of the luxe studio life. Flights on a corporate jet were common, with family members and friends often invited along. On occasion, Smith’s entourage and its belongings necessitated the use of two jets for travel to premieres.
Knowing that Sandler was a huge sports fan, Sony regularly sent him and his pals to the Super Bowl to do publicity. In addition to enjoying the best tickets and accommodations, they had a private basketball court to play on, which the studio rented for them. Back at the Sony lot, the basketball court was renamed Happy Madison Square Garden in the star’s honor.
When anybody questioned the wide latitude and endless indulgence given to Sandler and Smith, Sony executives had a standard answer: “Will and Adam bought our houses.”
Sony wasn’t unique in the perks it provided to its talent. Warner Bros. had vacation villas in Acapulco and Aspen that stars were welcome to fly to on a corporate jet. Universal custom-designed a Tuscan villa and a white modernist building on its lot to house the production companies of the directors Robert Zemeckis and Ivan Reitman. Bu
t Sony was consistently among the biggest spenders. An internal analysis by the studio found that from 2007 through 2012, it spent 13.5 percent more on “above the line” costs—industry jargon for stars, directors, and other key creative talent—than the rest of the industry did.
“Above-the-line costs represent an opportunity to improve margins,” the report modestly recommended.
Losing Luster
That was about to become a lot more true, because 2012 and 2013 were the years when the star business went south for Sony Pictures.
Many at the studio were already embarrassed by 2011’s Jack & Jill, a comedy that was insipid even by Sandler’s standards; in the film he played a man and his twin sister. Sony executives didn’t want to make it, but it was virtually impossible to say no to one of their biggest stars. And Sandler’s instincts had proved right before. He pushed to make 2009’s Paul Blart: Mall Cop, a Happy Madison production starring Kevin James, over the studio’s objections, and the low-budget comedy grossed a fantastic $183 million. So despite misgivings, Sony went ahead with Jack & Jill, which earned Sandler the worst reviews of his career (the Rotten Tomatoes rating was 3 percent) and was his lowest-grossing comedy since the bomb Little Nicky, in 2000. Still, it grossed $150 million globally and wasn’t a complete disaster.
That fate was reserved for his next movie: That’s My Boy. Originally titled I Hate You Dad, the 2012 movie featured Andy Samberg as the adult son of a middle-aged loser played by Sandler. The intent was to balance the star’s typical comedic shenanigans with genuine emotion. Once again, Pascal didn’t want to make the film, but Sandler insisted and even threatened to use one of Happy Madison’s “puts,” provisions in its contract allowing it to force the studio to release a film. She reluctantly agreed, but her fears proved right. The $70 million production—a ridiculous cost for a comedy that reflected the star’s still-huge paycheck—was a box-office bomb and lost $42.5 million.
That same year, Will Smith returned to the big screen after a hiatus, following 2008’s surprise disappointment, Seven Pounds. He starred in a sequel that Sony had been dying to make for many years. Men in Black 3 was a challenging movie to produce with a mature Will Smith. Now used to being the dominant creative force in his productions, he often demanded repeated changes to scripts and never worked with directors who could wield more power than he did. That was fine for Overbrook-led productions, but it became a challenge on the third Men in Black offering, which was made in a rush, to take advantage of New York tax credits.
The production was a nightmare. The unhappy Smith holed up in his fifty-three-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 creative conflicts between the star, his producers, and the studio were so severe that production was halted for three months to resolve them. Greenlit with a budget of $210 million, Men in Black 3 ended up costing $250 million and barely broke even.
Smith was hardly deterred, though. He had something far bigger in mind for his comeback. Aware that “star vehicles” were fading and talent needed to get involved in franchises, he and his colleagues at Overbrook developed a project called “1000 A.E.” Working out of a “war room” filled with concept art, the team envisioned a story set a millennium after the late-twenty-first-century destruction of Earth, which had been caused by environmental calamities. Not just a science-fiction franchise meant to reflect contemporary concerns, 1000 A.E. would be a “transmedia universe,” featuring storytelling on every platform.
To flesh out that universe, Smith worked with a team of writers to create a 294-page “bible.” It provided details about more than a thousand years of history, told across multiple families, planets, and “arks,” which had departed Earth with humanity’s survivors. As Overbrook’s not-too-modest pitch document described it, “Each generation discovers a world that connects with them on a visceral and emotional level—their appetite for revisiting that world is endless and as they grow older, the attraction continues to grow stronger. Star Trek, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter have all reached such stature, and now they are being joined by 1000 A.E.”
The document detailed plans for not only the movie and its sequel, but also a live-action television show, an animated series, webisodes and mobisodes, a video game, consumer products, theme-park attractions, documentaries, comic books, an “in-school education program in partnership with NASA,” and “cologne, perfume, toiletries, etc.” Fans would become so engaged in the 1000 A.E. universe, according to Overbrook, that it could become the center of their online lives. “Since there is no telling what will become of the Facebook model over the next 3–5 years,” the pitch document advised, “it is also essential to create a stand-alone AE branded Social Network.”
Sony executives had mixed opinions on the commercial potential of the concept, but they needed franchises and they believed in Smith. The biggest concern for Pascal and others was how much Will Smith the movie would have. Envisioned as a father-son adventure story, the script, in some versions, focused entirely on a young character played by the star’s son, Jaden. But naturally, Sony wanted its biggest action star to be onscreen as much as possible. Ultimately, Will Smith appeared in the movie, but spent most of it disabled in a spaceship that has crashed on a devastated Earth. He gives advice over a communicator to his son, who’s actually mobile and engaged in adventure.
Executives also weren’t thrilled with Smith’s choice of a director, M. Night Shyamalan, whose once-hot career had cooled with the widely disliked and commercially disappointing Lady in the Water, The Happening, and The Last Airbender (and would later be revived by Split).
As they put together marketing plans for the May 2013 release, eventually titled After Earth, Sony executives realized their best bet was a con job. “Conceal Will Smith’s injury,” read a set of marketing rules that the studio devised for the film. “He’s the star that everyone’s looking forward to seeing and it’s best for moviegoers to assume that he’s a part of the action—it’d be disappointing to our audience to discover that he spends the majority of the film stuck in the ship.”
“Also,” the document added, “M. Night Shyamalan can be polarizing, and should be downplayed everywhere possible.”
But no amount of deception could save After Earth, at least in the United States, where it grossed a dismal $61 million. Overseas it performed somewhat better, with $183 million, but ultimately the $149 million production lost more than $25 million. There were no sequels, no TV shows, no video games, no perfumes, and no social network. The failure was devastating to Smith, who not only acted in and produced the movie, but also got his first-ever feature screenwriting credit.
In the wake of After Earth and That’s My Boy, the golden age for Will Smith and Adam 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. The perks also weren’t so generous. “The corporate jet wasn’t available so much anymore,” said a person close to Sandler.
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,” De Luca told Pascal in 2014.
When Will Smith really wanted to star in Passengers, a big-budget science-fiction movie featuring two romantic leads who wake up early from cryogenic sleep on a spaceship, the studio had to reluctantly inform his agent that it preferred a younger rising star, Chris Pratt. “That wasn’t a comfortable phone call,” said De Luca, “because Will had made billions for the studio.”
Sandler, meanwhile, wanted Sony to greenlight an adaptation of the board game Candy Land, which he would star in and produce. When the studio proved reluctant, slowing down the development process, Sandler blew up during a “very difficul
t” conversation with Pascal. “You said yourself that Adam was gonna be angry,” Doug Belgrad reassured his boss, “and you said you didn’t care you couldn’t fix what was really bothering him that he isn’t the guy he once was and nobody can make that better for him.”
Following their flops in 2012 and 2013, Sandler and Smith each had only one live-action movie left at Sony before they could start searching for more welcoming backers elsewhere. Neither production was an easy one.
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 like Chiwetel Eijofor, who had been nominated for an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave. Amy Pascal believed it was the perfect movie to get “back on track” with Smith. True, the subject matter was grim, and football isn’t popular outside the United States, but an inspirational drama starring one of the world’s biggest movie stars still felt like a home run, along the lines of his mega-hit The Pursuit of Happyness from 2006. But there was a problem. Smith’s agents at CAA initially wanted him to be paid $15 million against 15 percent of the gross—a cut from his quote of $20 million against 20 percent, 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 of movie this is.” Pascal thought they should be able to get him for $10 million, but Lynton thought even that was too much. “Let’s try $7.5mm,” he told her. “He almost got us fired with the last movie.”