Will Smith has gone through a great ordeal last year which highly affected his impeccable career. But before that, his career used to be at its peak due to the strong portfolio he built over the years. He had touched almost every genre which was one of the factors why his career skyrocketed in the industry. However, stardom also comes with great consequences!

American actor, Will Smith

He opened up about a time when the actor lost his focus and started to strive toward fame instead of working more on his acting career back in the 90s. It could have links with Tom Cruise.

Will Smith Lost Midway to Focus on Winning!

Tom Cruise and Will Smith

Will Smith in a 2016 interview with The Hollywood Reporter opened up about how he was immersed in too much success that he started to focus on being a major star by winning.

He shared at the time,
“I had so much success that I started to taste global blood and my focus shifted from my artistry to winning.”
He further expressed how his creating projects became less of a concern for him.
“I wanted to win and be the biggest movie star, and what happened was there was a lag — around ‘Wild Wild West time’ — I found myself promoting something because I wanted to win versus promoting something because I believed in it.

While his winning thing was a temporary shift that he observed at a time, it could have been linked to his old pal, Tom Cruise whom he wanted to outshine at the time. But he eventually came to his sense when he met a project failure.

How Will Smith’s Failure Brought Him on Track?

Will Smith in Wild Wild West
 

The Men in Black star continued to share how the failure of his 1999 film, Wild Wild West eventually knocked him off. The film got negative reviews which grossed $222.1 million worldwide. He eventually opened up about how his projects eventually started getting to evolve with fans’ needs. He doesn’t want to trick his fans into watching something which looks different than what they were initially presented with.
“I consider myself a marketer. My career has been strictly being able to sell my products globally, and it’s now in the hand of fans. I have to be in tune with their needs and not trick them into going to see Wild Wild West.
Given the great transition in his thoughts, he eventually subsided the thoughts of getting on the path of a movie star to beat Cruise. Starting out his career in the late 90s, he once opened up about how he was keen to outdo the action star.
“I started quietly monitoring all of Tom’s global promotional activities.” He added, “I would ask the local movie executives to give me Tom’s promotional schedule. And I vowed to do two hours more than whatever he did in every country.”
However, he, later on, realized that latter put immense dedication into his project which eventually helped him in having a positive impact on the Emancipation star’s career. They became great friends since then but the infamous ‘The Slap’ incident reportedly estranged their bond.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter