Will Smith has been spotted filming the fourth installment of the Bad Boys franchise, and new photos show the actor/rapper having a great time on set.
The photos, which TMZ shared here, show the 54-year-old actor smiling from cheek-to-cheek while on set in Atlanta as he pats the backs of co-workers. The photos are the first update to arrive after Smith and Martin Lawrence first revealed plans for a Bad Boys 4 back in January.
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Sony Pictures confirmed to Variety that Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah are both on board to direct Bad Boys 4. The most recent film in the series, 2020’s Bad Boys For Life, raked in $426.5million at the worldwide box office, 25 years after 1995’s Bad Boys original collected $141million globally.
Will Smith made the announcement official with a post to social media declaring: “It’s about that time,” as he pulled up to his co-star’s house with “Shake Ya Tailfeather” from the Bad Boys II soundtrack booming through his car’s speakers.
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“It’s about that time. It’s official. Bad Boys for life,” Smith emphatically stated before they both realized 2020’s installment already used that title for the movie. “We shouldn’t have called it that though. The three was the ‘E’ but this is Bad Boys 4.”
Check out the pair’s original announcement below:
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This is now the second film Smith has worked on in the wake of his notorious slapping of Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards. He had previously starred in 2022’s Emancipation. Rock finally touched on the moment in his latest Netflix special Selective Outrage.
“Y’all know what happened to me, getting smacked by Shug Smith,” Rock said at the end of his hour-long special, which streamed live on Netflix back in March. “Everybody knows. Everybody fucking knows. Yes. It happened: Like a year ago, I got smacked at the fucking Oscars by this muthafucka.”
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He continued: “I watch Emancipation just to see him get whooped,” adding later that, “Will Smith practices selective outrage. Everyone that really knows knows I didn’t have anything to do with that shit. I didn’t have any ‘entanglements.’”
To make matters worse, Chris’s brother Tony Rock claimed despite what Smith said, the Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air star never actually reached out to Chris to apologize for the slap.
In an apology video released by Will months after the slap, the Academy Award winner revealed he had “reached out to Chris and the message that came back was that he’s not ready to talk.”
However, Tony Rock has said that wasn’t the case at all. “That wasn’t true, that wasn’t true,” alleged Rock. “I think like, two nights later, he said, ‘I reached out to Chris, and he didn’t want to talk.’ That wasn’t true. He doesn’t owe me anything I just thought we were better than that.”
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In the weeks following, Smith resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was ultimately banned from attending Academy events for a decade.
