WILL Smith faces the chop from Bad Boys 4 after he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars.
The new movie was set to arrive almost three decades after the original marked the beggining of Will’s biggest franchise in 1995.
A production timeline was being decided after Chris Bremner had so far penned a promising 40 pages of script.
Now according to The Hollywood Reporter, Bad Boys 4 has been put on hold while the 53-year-old actor appeals to the Academy to keep his first ever Oscar for his role in King Richard.
Will’s other upcoming project was Netflix movie Fast and Loose, which the THR claims has been “put on the back burner”.
Bad Boys for Life, the third in the franchise, was released in January of 2020 and was a huge box office smash, earning $426 million worldwide.
It earned more at the box office than Bad Boys and Bad Boys 2 combined, making a fourth movie an obvious way forward.
Will said he had “betrayed the trust of the Academy” as he resigned from the organisation, following his “shocking, painful, and inexcusable” actions a week ago today.
Will has anchored other lucrative film franchises Independence Day and Men in Black.
His films, both live-action and animated, have grossed more than $9 billion globally, according to box office researcher Comscore.
The musician and actor rose to prominence as the twentysomething star of the 1990s NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a show that lasted six seasons.
It helped launch his film career as an irreverent action hero, and later, his work as a producer of films and series.
His producing credits include Cobra Kai, the Netflix series inspired by the 1980s action film The Karate Kid, and the film for which he received the lead actor Oscar, King Richard, about the father of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.
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In a sign of his enduring appeal with audiences, in July 2020, Apple Inc’s Apple TV+ paid a reported $120 million for Emancipation, an action thriller about a slave on the run from the Confederacy, and Netflix greenlit a sequel to the 2017 urban fantasy epic, Bright, in 2018. Both star Will.
The Walt Disney Co announced in February it would send Will to both ends of the earth for a National Geographic series called Pole to Pole, for its Disney+ streaming service.
