Entertainment
Will Smith revives career with strong 'Bad Boys' box office opening
Two years after his infamous Oscars meltdown, Will Smith has slapped away lingering doubts about his career comeback.
A rare bright spot in the sluggish summer box office, the action-comedy “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” — co-starring Martin Lawrence — opened at the top of the box office charts this weekend with $56 million in domestic ticket sales and $104.6 million globally.
The stronger-than-expected debut for the fourth installment in the long-running buddy-cop franchise marks Smith’s 15th time leading a film to the No. 1 spot at the box office. The achievement is particularly notable as Smith returns to one of his best-known roles in his first major theatrical release since he stormed onto the stage and struck Chris Rock during the 2022 Oscars over a joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. (The actor, who went on to win the lead actor prize for his turn in “King Richard,” subsequently resigned from the film academy and apologized for his conduct.)
Given Smith’s track record — with more than $9 billion in lifetime box office earnings globally — industry expectations for “Ride or Die” heading into the weekend were cautiously optimistic.
The star’s last major outing, director Antoine Fuqua’s 2022 period action thriller “Emancipation,” in which Smith played an escaped slave, was largely ignored in its limited theatrical release and failed to earn any awards love, leaving the actor’s future an open question. But with the latest “Bad Boys” film, Smith found himself once again on solid ground, reuniting with Lawrence in a franchise dating back to his mid-1990s box office heyday.
Lawrence, left, and Smith in a scene from “Bad Boys: Ride or Die.”
(Frank Masi)
While “Ride or Die” fell short of the $62.5 million opening of its predecessor, 2020’s “Bad Boys for Life” — which ended up as the biggest box office hit of that pandemic-dampened year — it still delivered a much-needed boost to Hollywood’s summer box office, which has seen a string of releases like “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and “The Fall Guy” underperform.
Even with the relative success of “Ride or Die,” total domestic box office year-to-date is still running a staggering 26% below last year. As Hollywood continues to struggle to recover from the double-whammy of the pandemic and the strikes, the industry will take the good news anywhere it can find it.
“Ordinarily the gold standard [for a summer blockbuster] is a $100 million opening but in the context of this marketplace, this is a total win both for Will Smith and for the industry writ large,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for the data firm ComScore. “I think it also shows that, despite the fact that many moviegoers decry the lack of originality, this R-rated buddy-cop formula was exactly what audiences were looking for. If you look at the top summer movies, generally speaking they’re those tried-and-true brands and genres and stars.”
Indeed, while “Ride or Die” earned mixed reviews from critics, audiences were more favorable. Moviegoers, more than half of whom were under 35 and roughly 44% of whom were Black, gave the film an A-minus in CinemaScore in exit polls and a 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Past controversy notwithstanding, Sony, which released “Ride or Die,” did not shy away from Smith in its marketing, with the star conducting an extensive publicity tour and showing up at the film’s Los Angeles premiere performing his 1997 hit “Miami” atop a double-decker bus.
For audiences, there is a certain Pavlovian response to showing up for a summer movie starring Smith, who has had a disproportionate impact on Hollywood’s most critical season with past blockbusters like “Independence Day,” “Men in Black,” “Hancock” and “I, Robot.” But at age 55, with his popularity dinged by the fallout from his Oscars outburst, it remains to be seen how he might fare outside of that familiar comfort zone.
“They used to call Will Smith ‘Mr. Fourth of July’ — there was a time when you’d look up ‘summer movie season’ in the dictionary and his picture would be there,” says Dergarabedian. “If you plug in Will Smith, Martin Lawrence and ‘Bad Boys,’ you’re going to have a hit — it’s just a fait accompli. The bigger question is, what’s his next movie going to do?”
Sony also claimed the No. 2 spot this weekend, with “The Garfield Movie” pulling in $10 million in its third week of release. To date, the animated film about the lasagna-loving feline has grossed $68.6 million in North America and $192 million globally.
Paramount’s family film “If” claimed the third slot with $8 million in its fourth weekend of release. After a slow start, the film has earned $93.5 million domestically and $160.7 million worldwide.
This weekend’s other major new release, the supernatural horror film “The Watchers,” landed in fourth place with a disappointing $7 million from 3,351 venues. Directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan, the daughter of filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, and starring Dakota Fanning, the film was panned by critics and audiences alike, earning a C- CinemaScore.
Rounding out the top five, Disney and 20th Century’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” with $5.4 million in its fourth weekend, has earned $149 million in North America and $359.8 globally but is still lagging behind the three previous installments in the rebooted franchise.
While “Ride or Die” provided a moment of hope for the beleaguered box office — or at least a brief respite from the doom — the next few weeks will determine whether this is the beginning of a sustained recovery or merely a temporary blip in an otherwise dismal summer season. The Pixar sequel “Inside Out 2” hits theaters next week, followed at the end of June by the prequel “A Quiet Place: Day One” and the Kevin Costner-directed western epic “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1.”
“If this movie had underperformed, we’d be really pulling our hair out trying to figure out what’s going on,” says Dergarabedian. “This was a great result but it didn’t move the needle. It took us a while to get here and it’s not going to change overnight. But at least we’re stepping in the right direction.”
Movie Reviews
Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror
I am a sucker for all those straight-to-video slasher movies from the 90’s; there was just a certain point where you knew the acting was terrible, however, it made you fall in love. I can definitely remember scanning the video store sections for all the different horror movies I could. All those movies had laughable names and boom mics accidentally getting in the frame. Trucker seems like a child of all those old dreams, because it is.
Let’s get into the review.
Synopsis
When a group of reckless teens cause an accident swroe to never speak of it. The father is reescued by a strange man. from the wreckage and nursed back to health by a mysterious old man. When the group agrees to visit the accident scene, they meet their match from a strange masked trucker and all his toys with revenge on his mind.
Roll on 18 Wheleer
Trucker is what you would imagine: a movie about a psychotic trucker chasing you. We have seen it many, many times. What makes the film so different is its homage to bad movies but good ideas. I don’t mean in a negative way. When you think of a slasher movie, it’s not very complicated; as a matter of fact, it takes five minutes to piece the film together. This is so simple and childlike, and I absolutely love it. Trucker gave us something a little different, not too gory, bad CGI fire, I mean, this is all we old schlock horror fans want. Trucker is the type of film that you expect from a Tubi Original, on speed. However, I would take this over any Tubi Original.
I found some parts that were definitely a shout-out to the slasher humor from all those movies. Another good point that made the film shine was the sets. I guess what I can say is the film is everything Joy Ride should have been. While most modern slashers are trying to recreate the 1980s, the film stands out with its love for those unloved 1990’s horror films. While most see Joyride, you are extremely mistaken, my friend; you will enjoy this film much more.

In The End
In the end, I enjoyed the entire film. At first, I saw it listed as an action thriller; I was pleasantly surprised, and Trucker pulled at my heart strings, enveloping me in its comfort from a long-forgotten time in horror. It’s a nostalgic blast for me, thinking back to that time, my friends, my youth, and finding my new home. Horror fans are split down the middle: from serial-killer clowns (my side) to elevated horror, where an artist paints a forty-thousand-year-old demon that chases them around an upper-class studio apartment. I say that a lot, but it’s the best way to describe some things.
The entire movie had me cheering while all the people I hated suffered dire consequences for their actions. It’s the same old story done in a way that we rabid fans could drool over, and it worked. In all the bad in the world today, and my only hope for the future is the soon-to-end Terrifier franchise. However, the direction was a recipe to succeed with 40+ year old horror fans like me. I see the film as a hope for tomorrow, leading us into a new era.
Trucker is set to release on March 10th, 2026
Entertainment
Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater
The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.
Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.
Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.
Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.
The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”
As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)
As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.
Movie Reviews
‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel
It’s funny how this film is marketed as the first Scream movie in IMAX, yet it’s their sloppiest work to date. Williamson accomplishes two decent kills. My praise goes to the prosthetic team and gore above anything else. The filmmaking is amateurish, lacking any of the tension build and innovation in set pieces like the Radio Silence or Craven entries. Many slasher sequences consist of terribly spliced editing and incomprehensible camera movement. There was a person at my screening asking if one of the Ghostfaces was killed. I responded, “Yeah, they were shot in the head; you just couldn’t see it because the filmmaking is so damn unintelligible.”
Really, Spyglass? This is the best you can do to “damage control” your series that was perfectly fine?
I’m getting comments from morons right now telling me that I’m biased for speaking “politically” about this movie. Fuck you! This poorly made, bland, and franchise-worst entry is a byproduct of political cowardice.
The production company was so adamant about silencing their outspoken star, who simply stated that she’s against the killing of Palestinian people by an evil totalitarian regime, that they deliberately fired her, conflating her comments to “anti-semintism,” when, and if you read what she said exactly, it wasn’t. Only to reconstruct the buildup made in her arc and settle on a nonsensical, manufactured, nostalgia-based slop fest to appeal to fans who lack genuine film taste in big 2026. To add insult to injury, this movie actively takes potshots at those predecessors, perhaps out of pettiness that Williamson didn’t pen them or a mean-spirited middle finger to the star the studio fired. Truly, fuck you. Take the Barrera aspect out of this, which is still impossible, and Scream 7 is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, no-vision, enshittification of Scream and a bloody embarrassment to the franchise. It took a real, morally upright actress to make Ghostface’s knife go from metal to plastic.
FINAL STATEMENT
You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become a Stab.
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