People Are Still Talking About That Stupid Slap (Some Thoughts About the Prospects of Bad Boys 4)

Remember when the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air slapped Cheap Pete?

Very likely you do, to go by how everyone discussing the box office prospects of Bad Boys 4 (out this weekend!) keeps bringing it up as a possible factor in the film's performance.

I suspect this is less because the incident is likely to make much difference to the film's actual box office prospects than because it still amuses them that Smith slapped Rock, and still amuses them to talk about it. Indeed, this is so much the case that if "the slap" has any effect at all, rather than putting people off of Smith and his movie, it would probably help the box office, especially given reports that the movie will play off of the incident in some way.

Indeed, a far bigger danger to the movie's performance than any ill feeling toward Will Smith's display of an idiocy too often overlooked in the past is what the courtiers of the film industry are not talking about--namely the pandemic's exacerbation of the long decline of filmgoing in North America and elsewhere, and what is connected with it, the declining salability of tired action-adventure franchises like the now three decade-old Bad Boys "saga." But there is a reason for that--entertainment journalists preferring to continue adhering to the narrative that the lousy grosses we have seen from 2023 on a matter of particular cinematic and franchise failures (the troubles of Marvel, resolvable with "better writers" and more "supervision" of directors), or particular bumps in the road for the business (the Hollywood strikes of 2023), rather than a matter of structural changes in the business with which people of the caliber of the executives running the studios are profoundly unequipped to cope, no matter how much their courtiers assure them they are all the "smartest guy in the room."