We’re taking a look at the filmography of one of the biggest stars of the planet, Will Smith, and ranking it from worst to best. In terms of pure charisma, there are few actors on the planet who can match the gargantuan and universally beloved charm of Will Smith. The one-time Fresh Prince spun his rap career into a hit NBC television series, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, then transitioned to film, moving from quieter independent dramas to game-changing blockbusters.
Over the course of 30 years, Will Smith became one of the most bankable actors in the industry. In 2007, Newsweek declared him to be "the most powerful actor in Hollywood." By 2016, Smith's movies had grossed $7.5 billion worldwide, and that's before the release of 2019's billion-dollar hit Aladdin. On top of commercial success, Smith has two Oscar nominations and four Grammy Awards to his name. To this day, he remains one of the most successful Black actors in Hollywood history.
Smith’s career has had its ebbs and flows over the years. The past 15 years or so have been less popular than he ever was in his peak but box office blips have done nothing to dilute his status as a beloved and worldwide icon. His social media presence and YouTube channel offer regular reminders of his specific kind of bombastic dad-joke charm. Now aged 51, Smith seems to be entering another phase of his enduring career, focusing on smaller, more prestige-driven titles made by Black directors. Up next on his schedule is King Richard, a biographical drama about Richard Williams, father of tennis legends Venus and Serena, and Emancipation, a historical drama about a runaway slave trying to join the Union Army, which will be helmed by Antoine Fuqua. These are very different films for Smith, whose personality and on-screen presence is so distinctive that it dominates most of the work he releases. You know A Will Smith Movie when you see it: Cocky, slightly goofy, immensely charming, and just earnest enough. There’s a reason he remains so loved, even as his commercial power dwindled.
With that in mind, we’re taking a look at the filmography of Will Smith and ranking it from worst to best. This list will not include cameo roles or parts where he plays himself.
WORST: Bright
It was a big deal for Smith to head to Netflix with a high-concept R-rated action thriller combining the grit and realism of director David Ayer’s previous work End of Watch with the urban fantasy of World of Warcraft. Bright was hotly-hyped and seen as a turning point for the streaming service as it hoped to keep up with the traditional studio system and their event blockbusters.
Bright, sadly, was more a disaster than success (although Netflix still claims its viewership numbers were extremely good.) The set-up of a modern-day Los Angeles populated with mythical creatures isn’t a bad one, but the muddled metaphors of racial injustice that swapped people of color for orcs was deeply misguided, to put it kindly. The film itself was visually ugly, thematically incoherent, and simply incomprehensible on a basic structural level as if the screenplay by the infamous Max Landis never got past the first draft. Hearing Will Smith say, “Fairy lives don’t matter today” is a real low point in his career.
Suicide Squad
David Ayer has spoken candidly about how his adaptation of DC Comics’ Suicide Squad was ruined by reshoots, multiple edits, and studio panic, so it’s easy to be sympathetic about the mess that is the final product that landed in theaters. That doesn’t make it any easier to watch, however, as Suicide Squad is so technically and narratively messy that you can’t help but wonder how it ended up so bad. The shoddy attempts to marry Ayer’s bleak bad-guys-on-a-mission movie with a rushed neon overlay and uninteresting humor only exacerbates the inherent problems at the core of a film that never really got a chance to be its own thing.
Smith and cast members like Viola Davis and Margot Robbie end up as its sole saving graces, but even Will Smith’s charisma can only carry Suicide Squad so far. He will not be returning for the sequel-slash-soft reboot, directed by James Gunn.
Seven Pounds
Smith has some great dramatic chops but his choice of projects to show off those skills hasn’t necessarily benefitted him as an actor. 2007's Seven Pounds is the worst example of his eagerness to be taken seriously as a prestigious actor. It's a near-pornographic misery fest designed to needle the viewer into crying, but the pure artifice of its approach to an already baffling story mostly elicited eye-rolls or fits of laughter.
Smith also simply isn't good here, having squeezed out every drop of his charm to play a cliché of a sad person. The ending also signifies one of the most insulting and potentially dangerous depictions of suicide ever committed to the big screen, It's that climax that stops the movie from being funny-bad and sends it into the realms of mere awfulness.
Collateral Beauty
If Seven Pounds is an example of Smith’s worst attempts to be serious, then Collateral Beauty is the most hilariously misguided flipside of that. Smith stars alongside a ridiculously talented cast that includes Helen Mirren, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Naomie Harris, and Keira Knightley, all of whom seem a tad embarrassed to be in this bonkers drama about grief.
Smith plays a grieving father whose business partners decide to push him out of their business by hiring a group of actors to play the manifestations of Love, Death, and Time and gaslight him until he can be declared mentally unbalanced. All of this is played completely earnestly and overloaded with saccharine sentimentality when in reality this would probably make a solid horror movie. Everything about Collateral Beauty is ham-fisted, contrived, and unbearably cheesy, but it's also far too unintentionally hilarious to write off as a simple flop.
After Earth
Most of the jokes about After Earth are rooted in the project being seen as a vanity project for Smith and his son Jaden. Alex Pappademas of Grantland called the movie a "parade-float tribute to nepotism" while some hypothesized that the plot, centered on people who have to suppress their emotions to fight alien creatures who can sense fear, was a thinly-veiled advert for Scientology. All of this makes After Earth seem far more interesting than it actually is.
For a costly vanity project, directed by M. Night Shyamalan of all people, it's mostly boring but has some moments of emotion and action that work. Jaden Smith was unfairly singled out for his admittedly weak performance, but you can't help but feel sympathy for him given that it was his dad who put him front and center (he's much better in works like Skate Kitchen and The Get Down). In an interview with Esquire, Smith later called the film "the most painful failure" of his career.
Wild Wild West
Everything about the big-screen adaptation of the 1960s TV series The Wild Wild West seemed like a guaranteed hit in the making, from the casting of Smith, the biggest actor on Earth, to the directorial choice of Men in Black's Barry Sonnenfeld to the costly steampunk-style production design and VFX. What resulted was a film that Smith himself considers one of the biggest mistakes of his career. Wild Wild West is loud and overcrowded with stuff but depressingly lacking in laughs. Kenneth Branagh gives the worst performance of his life as a former Confederate general with no legs and a fetish for mechanical spiders, and Smith and co-star Kevin Kline’s chemistry feels mismatched.
Watching the comedy of this movie fall as flat as it does is often deeply uncomfortable, and those much-discussed action scenes feel derivative and oddly lightweight. What stops the film from being a total turkey is Smith’s end credits rap, which has a music video that does everything the movie does but much better.
The Legend of Bagger Vance
It must have been a huge deal for Smith to work on a film directed by the legendary Robert Redford, and The Legend of Bagger Vance certainly seemed like Oscar bait in the making. While it certainly looks and sounds good, thanks to cinematography and music by Michael Ballhaus and Rachel Portman, the historical drama feels hopelessly out-of-date.
Smith plays a mysterious traveler who becomes the caddy for a down-on-his-luck golfer, played by Matt Damon, trying to win a much-needed cash prize during the Great Depression. Through Bagger Vance's wisdom and advice, Damon finds his groove and becomes a better person. Many critics rightly noted the film's cloying and questionable use of the "magical negro" trope, making Smith a poorly-developed plot device to aid the white protagonist in his troubles. It's such a waste of Smith's power and a cliché that Hollywood should have put to bed decades ago.
Winter’s Tale
Smith only appears in screenwriter Akiva Goldsman’s directorial debut for a few minutes but he certainly makes an impression. How could he not when he’s playing Satan, and doing so while wearing a Jimmy Hendrix t-shirt during the turn of the 20th century? Winter’s Tale is the sort of bad movie that we only get once in a while, a wholehearted disaster that is endlessly entertaining to watch because of how baffling every aspect of it is.
Set in a magical New York City full of warring gangs, flying horses, and occasional bouts of time travel, Winter’s Tale is a tough film to condense into a mere synopsis. Still, it’s kind of a blast to see all of these actors, including Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe, give everything they have to total nonsense. It deserves to be a midnight movie favorite on the same level as The Room.
Shark Tale
2004's Shark Tale, courtesy of the then-rising powers at Dreamworks Animation, was Will Smith's debut as a voice actor. The studio had firmly established themselves as Disney and Pixar’s biggest competition in the world of animation thanks to the success of Shrek, and Shark Tale seemed to be more of the same: A sardonic family-friendly picture full of anthropomorphic animals, pop culture gags, and a starry voice cast more showy and expensive than anything at the House of Mouse.
Alas, the movie itself was simply bad, and a firm reminder to Hollywood that 3D animation didn’t automatically make a movie better. Everything about Shark Tale feels tired and the overwhelming number of fish puns proved exhausting rather than entertaining.
I Am Legend
In terms of pure performance, Smith could easily make the case that I Am Legend contains his finest piece of acting work across three decades in the business. He commands the screen alone for most of the running time, brings energy and weariness to a man forced to stay sane as he walks the streets of New York City alone during the day and fights off vampires at night.
It all falls apart when the sun goes down and said vampires are revealed to be some of the decade’s worst CGI creations. Infamously, the film of I Am Legend changed the ending from that of Richard Matheson’s novel, which entirely neutered the point of the narrative and left a lot of audiences feeling cheated. In terms of pure lost potential, I Am Legend is the biggest offender in Smith’s filmography.
Men in Black II
Men in Black was such a pitch-perfect blockbuster, the likes of which made Smith iconic the world over. That set-up of a secret agency monitoring alien activity on Earth should have been easy to spin into a multi-film franchise. So why is Men in Black II so bad? Essentially, it made the ultimate sequel mistake of trying to recreate the original movie beat-for-beat, even if doing so meant undoing all of the character arcs and world-building of the first story.
That dynamite chemistry between Smith and Tommy Lee Jones is nowhere to be seen, the villain is far less interesting, and there’s nothing here that the first film didn’t do way better. Overall, Men in Black II is a cycle of wasted opportunities that the film-makers would thankfully learn from before returning to the series.
Gemini Man
Gemini Man was tantamount to Hollywood lore by the time it entered production with Smith in the lead and Ang Lee directing. The movie had been passed from pillar to post with practically every major actor of the past 20 years attached to star at some point, from Harrison Ford and Robert De Niro to Ben Affleck and Idris Elba. The problem, reportedly, was that film-making technology had not yet caught up to the story's high concept of a retired hitman being forced to fight a younger clone of himself.
The visuals in the final product certainly are impressive but it’s not enough to hang an entire film on, especially when the story itself is subpar. Shot in a high frame rate, Gemini Man also looks oddly cheap, which feels at odds with the obviously costly CGI of young Will Smith, and even that still carries a touch of the uncanny valley. Made on a reported budget of $138 million before marketing and other costs, the film only grossed $173.5 million and reportedly lost over $111 million for Paramount.
Made in America
A rare supporting role for Smith made while he was still starring on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Made in America was a star vehicle for Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg, two of the biggest comedy actors of the early ’90s. Smith plays the best friend to a young woman who discovers that her father is a brash white used cars salesman, despite her mother requesting a Black sperm donor. All the expected personality clashes ensue and everything about the movie is extremely '90s. It's inoffensive but ultimately unnecessary, even though there is a small pleasure to be found in seeing Will Smith looking so young green on the big screen.
Focus
2015's crime caper Focus saw Smith team up pre-Suicide Squad with Margot Robbie for a modern-day twist on classic heist movies like the original Ocean's Eleven and Charade. There's enough witty banter and romantic chemistry between the movie's two impeccably good-looking leads to keep the film afloat, and it's distracting enough with its exotic locales and well-oiled heist set-pieces, but there's just something missing from Focus that's tough to nail down. A film with this sort of narrative needs more than mere charm to keep it going, although Smith and Robbie alike certainly have tons of that to spare.
I, Robot
Isaac Asimov's short story collection I, Robot and his development of the fictional history and rules of robotics is one of the most influential pieces of literature in 20th-century science-fiction, but it doesn't necessarily lend itself well to a traditional Hollywood adaptation. Director Alex Proyas and screenwriters Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman choose to turn the conceit into a sci-fi action-mystery, with Smith playing a hard-bitten police officer whose distrust of the robots that are part of everyday life in 2035 is challenged when he's forced to deal with a robot charged with murder.
I, Robot may prove irritating to hardcore Asimov fans but it's still an enjoyable, if somewhat dim, Summer thrill ride. It softens and simplifies Asimov's oft-clinical style but keeps an interesting emotional core at its heart, largely provided by the motion-capture performance of Alan Tudyk.
Bad Boys II
In terms of pure Bayhem, Bad Boys II is probably the most Michael Bay-esque film that the divisive and impossibly powerful director has ever made. The movie is 147 minutes of relentless sound and fury, with as many explosions as Bay can set off in-between the banter, the violence, and the often stomach-churning misogyny.
For some fans, Bad Boys II is as good as Bay gets because this is the director totally off the leash, but for others, including the majority of contemporary critics, it was too exhausting, too overladen with racist and sexist stereotypes, and burdened with an unnecessarily complicated plot. It’s overwhelming in a way you’ll either love or hate, with little middle-ground.
Aladdin
Disney’s current trend of live-action remakes of their beloved animated movies has proven to be a commercial goldmine, even as critics lambast the fad as lazy and unimaginative. Guy Ritchie probably wasn’t the best choice to bring 1991’s Aladdin to the big screen in this form but he still managed to pull off a heartily enjoyable reimagining that is unique enough to justify its existence. Smith is back to his classic bombastic best in the role of the Genie, putting his own mark of the role established so indelibly by Robin Williams.
He’s such a force of personality that the movie mercifully bends to make room for his one-man-show. The more obvious faults with the final product lie in that impossible endeavor of remaking something almost entirely for purposes of corporate synergy rather than creative fulfillment, but Smith more than gets the job done.
Hancock
Superhero movies have entirely saturated the landscape of Hollywood over the past decade, to the point where Peter Berg’s 2008 movie Hancock can’t help but feel somewhat ahead of the game. Smith plays a vigilante superhero with powers of mysterious origin who mostly causes havoc on the streets of Los Angeles thanks to his drunkenness and general disdain for humanity. In desperate need of a PR revamp, he agrees to a corporate overhaul to clean up his image.
The first half of the movie is great, allowing Smith to play against type as an unlikeable jerk and having fun with superhero tropes that had yet to become well-worn on the big screen. The problems come in the second half when Hancock’s backstory is revealed and the movie takes a totally unexpected genre shift thanks to some late in production reshoots. It doesn’t sink the movie but it does leave you wondering what would have happened if Hancock had stuck to its guns more.
Hitch
Smith's career was primarily defined through comedy and action, so it was something of a surprise when he stepped into the world of the rom-com with 2005's Hitch. Smith plays a professional dating doctor who claims that he can train men to woo their dream women and that he can match anyone, regardless of their faults or cynicism, with their soulmate.
His plans begin to fall apart thanks to a handful of tricky clients and the introduction of a sardonic gossip columnist who doesn't fall for any of his methods. Smith is such a natural fit for this kind of role and brand of romantic hero that it’s a shock he hasn’t done more movies like Hitch, even if the story is predictable.
Concussion
Smith got a lot of flak for his admittedly ropey Nigerian accent in the biographical drama Concussion, which is a shame because he’s also very strong in this old-school underdog tale of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the physician who became the first person to study and reveal the extent of chronic brain injuries among American football players.
Concussion makes the interesting choice to focus more on Dr. Omalu’s journey and the obstacles he faces than the larger issue of the NFL’s lack of accountability on this dangerous issue. It works for the most part but this is a story that really could have used some more context, especially if it wanted to make its crucial and all-too-prescient message land more effectively.
The Pursuit of Happyness
Smith landed his second Oscar nomination with The Pursuit of Happyness, a drama based on the true story of Chris Gardner, a man who struggled with homelessness and raising his young son while trying to establish his career as a stockbroker.
Given the circumstances of this story, it's a surprise how much the movie manages to successfully veer away from melodrama, and a lot of that triumph falls on the shoulders of Smith, who captures the frustration and ceaseless desperation of a man left with zero options but to work hard in a broken system. He’s much better than the film itself but fortunately, there is enough here to bolster his great work.
Bad Boys
It's the movie that heralded the arrival of Will Smith as the undisputed action star and leading man of his era, and it's made all the more thrilling through its contrast with his goofy work as the Fresh Prince and the quieter character-driven work he had done in films up until that point.
Smith and co-star Martin Lawrence have the kind of chemistry that most directors would kill for, and while Michael Bay had yet to evolve into the instantly recognizable chaos agent of modern-day blockbusters that he would become, the movie is still full of markers that would signal the big things to come. This was audiences’ first introduction to Smith as someone who could command the screen on the same level as contemporaries like Tom Cruise, and the rest is history.
Spies in Disguise
The animated movie Spies in Disguise could probably never live up to the surprise delight of its trailer, which started out as a rollicking spy movie before turning Smith’s character into a talking pigeon. That twist was such a joy that Twitter couldn’t help but make it viral. The film itself is actually a pleasing diversion that’s bound to delight plenty of kids and parents alike. It’s a much better fit for Smith as a voice actor than Shark Tale ever was.
Men in Black III
So much of Men in Black III feels like an apology for its inferior predecessor, and while it still doesn’t reach the heights of the first movie, it more than makes up for the second one’s failings. Barry Sonnenfeld returned to direct but Tommy Lee Jones wisely took a step back to allow for some time travel fun that results in Smith hanging out with a younger Agent K, played to eerie perfection by Josh Brolin.
It's, perhaps inevitably, still something of a retread of the first movie but there's way more inventiveness on display here. Jemaine Clement has a ball as the main baddie and Michael Stuhlbarg is sweetly engaging. For fans of that first movie, it's refreshing to see Men in Black back on stronger footing with this vibrant and funny effort. It's just a shame the attempt at a spin-off, Men in Black: International was such a disappointment.
Where the Day Takes You
Smith made his big-screen debut in 1992 at the fresh-faced age of 24 with Where the Day Takes You, a small-scale crime thriller about a group of teen runaways trying to survive life on the streets of Los Angeles while dealing with the many demons of their pasts. Smith stars alongside Sean Astin, Ricki Lake, Alyssa Milano, and a surprising array of other recognizable faces.
Smith's character Manny is a disabled man with no legs who is attacked on the streets by an enemy of the main teen gang. It’s a small role that gently hinted at his potential, but he’s firmly part of an ensemble that helps keep the emotions authentic and gritty themes effective, despite an unconvincing ending.
Bad Boys For Life
The long-awaited return of Bad Boys happened without Michael Bay but with all of the chemistry between Smith and Lawrence still in place. Surprisingly, the franchise is able to maintain its energy and bombast even without the all-consuming Bayhem. Detectives Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) and Mike Lowery (Smith) are now older and somewhat wiser, keen to keep their infamous levels of collateral damage to a minimum.
They may be slightly wearier and, as they said in Lethal Weapon, "too old for this s**t" but they’re no less committed to the action-laden melodrama. Thanks to the unique circumstances of this year in entertainment being brought to a complete standstill by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Bad Boys for Life is currently the highest-grossing movie of 2020 so far.
Six Degrees of Separation
In the context of his full career, Six Degrees of Separation feels like Smith playing against type, but this came out before his evolution into a high-concept megastar, establishing him as a real dramatic talent who was going places. Based on the play of the same name by John Guare, Smith plays a young conman who inserts himself into the upper echelons of New York high society by claiming to be an Ivy League student and the son of Sidney Poitier.
While it's a tad too stagey in its production - a common problem faced by film adaptations of plays - director Fred Schepisi and a talented cast still manages to convey the sharply observed ideas of class, race, and the crooked machinations of the American dream that made the play so compelling. Smith is especially striking in a tricky role, charming over everyone he meets while still carrying a curious aura of mystery and potential malice around him.
Enemy of the State
It's surprising that Smith and uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer never made more movies together in the late '90s given that Smith is the ideal leading man for his particular brand of full-on bombastic slickness. As it is, their sole team-up, 1998's Enemy of the State, directed by Tony Scott, is a highly enjoyable tech thriller that ended up feeling incredibly prescient in its portrayal of government-sanctioned surveillance and invasion of privacy.
Smith plays a nice guy lawyer who ends up entangled in a case of mass political corruption after he accidentally comes into possession of evidence of the murder of a U.S. Senator at the hands of a corrupt NSA official. Smith makes for a memorable innocent man caught up in problems he’s ill-equipped to deal with, and Scott does a strong job in depicting the omnipresence of state surveillance in the modern age. The paranoia is off the charts in this movie, and it’s all to striking effect.
Independence Day
We could list the many faults of Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day right here, but that would be beside the point? Is it an objectively great movie? Not necessarily, but it is kind of the perfect Summer blockbuster and the sort of big trashy spectacle that is endlessly rewatchable.
Sure, the plot is thin and the characters are more archetypes than fully-fleshed-out human beings, but for a film this exhilarating, it hardly matters. Independence Day wears its cheesy heart right on its garish sleeve. The movie also represents the absolute peak of Will Smith’s A-List movie-star power. There’s just something endlessly satisfying about watching him punch aliens in the face, and we’re not ashamed to admit it.
Ali
Michael Mann took on the unenviable task of telling the astounding life story of the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, something that could probably fill up hours of screen-time and barely scratch the surface of his near-mythic tale. The director’s cut is the best option available but the initial theatrical release is still a fascinating and deeply compelling piece of work. The opening montage alone contains some of Mann's best work.
What Ali nails is those seeming contrasts in Ali's life: His love of the limelight versus his then-controversial political stances; his deadly serious approach to his own life and his wicked sense of humor; the whiplash of experiencing avid devotion from the public only for it to be replaced by mouth-frothing rage, yet both experiences are dictated by racism. Smith wholly threw himself into the challenge of playing an instantly recognizable icon and he's the perfect choice for conveying that lightning-in-a-bottle magnetic charm that even some of the best actors alive simply can't replicate. Smith received his first Oscar nomination for the role and rightly so.
BEST: Men in Black
While it is seldom credited as such, Men in Black is truly one of the great Summer blockbusters of the 1990s. It’s a well-oiled machine that pulls off every aspect with ease and giddily mixes the mainstream with the esoteric. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones make a wonderful well-matched odd couple pairing in a twist on the age-old buddy cop comedy trope. Jones ends up being the perfect droll foil for Smith’s confused newbie cop who discovers that extra-terrestrial life is closer to him than he ever thought it would be.
It's a delight to see a film this unabashedly silly take itself just seriously enough, with Barry Sonnenfeld throwing everything at the screen, from creative alien designs to a wonderfully repulsive villain played by Vincent D'Onofrio to top-notch jokes to truly satisfying character arcs for Smith, Jones, and the criminally underrated Linda Fiorentino. Ultimately, what makes Men in Black worthy of the top spot is that it’s the most well-defined and wholly thrilling platform for Will Smith. It's the definition of A Will Smith Movie, and it's the sort of entertaining Summer delight we could always use more of.