Will Smith

I’ll admit, I was one of those people mildly excited for Independence Day: Resurgence. Not only did the film return both Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman  —  as well as the up-and-coming Maika Monroe  —  it was also a welcome trip down memory lane to the original Independence Day, one of the first really big blockbuster movies I remember seeing in theaters. I know I’m not the only one whose interest in the film was pure nostalgia; as it turns out, this link to the past is exactly why Will Smith chose not to come back for a second film.

Once in the Suicide Squad, always in the Suicide Squad, at least if you’re Will Smith and his co-star Ike Barinholtz, who has just joined Smith and Joel Edgerton in David Ayer’s Netflix orc buddy cop movie Bright. Which is a very weird second half of a sentence to type.

Following through on the soupy metaphysics and syrupy emotionality of past projects Seven Pounds and The Pursuit of Happyness, Will Smith completes his “All Along, the Meaning of Life… Was Love” trilogy on December 16 with David Frankel’s Collateral Beauty. A new trailer for the inspirational/”inspirational” morality play has surfaced online today, and it contains all the sky-high emotions, A Christmas Carol-but-with-a-soul narrative structuring, and elaborate domino structures that audiences would expect. It could certainly use more footage of Smith playing with dominos, but then, what movie couldn’t?

You know when you’re a kid and you write letters to Santa Claus? Pretend you’re actually a middle aged man suffering from depression, you write a letter to the universe and, BOOM Helen Mirren shows up in response! But she’s not Santa Claus, she’s Death.

Bad Boys 3 is finally gearing up to head into production with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence returning to reprise their roles from Michael Bay’s previous films. But with filming not set to begin until early next year, the release date for the long-developing sequel has been delayed yet again, this time to 2018. On the slightly more positive side of things, the sequel has a new title, and it’s one that should earn the approval of Bad Boys fans.

The box-office records it demolished over the weekend aren’t the only broken parts of Suicide Squad. For all its admittedly impressive financial success, the movie’s story is shockingly incoherent, and that’s when the film has a story at all. Sure, Will Smith was great and Margot Robbie made an impressively committed Harley Quinn. But in much the same way the Suicide Squad is held hostage in Midway City by sinister bureaucrats, Smith, Robbie, and company are trapped in a movie that gives them very little play and makes even less sense.

How was the Joker? Is Ben Affleck’s Batman a welcome addition? What about the other surprise DC cameo? Does Amanda Waller’s plan make any sense at all? Who the heck is Slipknot? How does Harley Quinn fit into the rest of the Suicide Squad? Why did they introduce Katana so late in the movie? What the hell was going on with the Enchantress? Did they really just rip off Ghostbusters with that ending? All of those topics and more are on the table for our FULL SPOILERS discussion and review of Suicide Squad.

It seemed inevitable that the trend of TV revivals would eventually reach The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and indeed, some confusion erupted when Will Smith’s production company began development of a suspiciously-similar fish-out-of-water story. That never came to pass, but thankfully Smith now says he’d only consider a Fresh Prince revival “when hell freezes over.”

If you liked the scene in Batman v Superman where Bruce Wayne watched YouTube videos about the future members of the Justice League, you'll love Suicide Squad. Instead of just one scene of plot-stopping fan service, Suicide Squad delivers an entire first act of soul-deadening exposition. The movie spends nearly 30 story-free minutes with a Machiavellian bureaucrat while she sits in a restaurant discussing a top secret personnel file. Here is Deadshot, the world’s greatest assassin; this is Harley Quinn, the Joker’s psychotic girlfriend. Oh, and have you heard about Captain Boomerang? And on and on and on.

Yesterday, the cast and director of Suicide Squad took to Twitter to answer fans’ questions about the upcoming movie. And while many of the questions were geared towards the actors’ relationships with the superhero franchise — their favorite characters, superpowers, or questions as to who would win in a fight between the various heroes and villains of the DC universe — there were a few questions that offered the cast and a crew a chance to either dive deep into the filmmaking experience or just have some fun with the answer. I’ve listed a few of my favorites below, but you can view the full Q&A at the official Suicide Squad Twitter page.