Will Smith admits that sci-fi bomb ‘After Earth’ was a ‘failure’

Will Smith is surprisingly frank when it comes to the lack of success of his last big attempted blockbuster, “After Earth,” which topped out at $60 million at the U.S. box office. “After the failure of ‘After Earth,’ a thing got broken in my mind. I was like, ‘Oh wow, I’m still alive. Oh wow, actually I still am me even though the movie didn’t open No. 1,'” Smith says. “All of those things in my mind — my entire ‘Mr. July, Big Willy Weekend, No. 1, eight in a row!’ — all of that thing got collapsed and I realized I still was a good person.” Well, that’s super for him.

Unfortunately, when it comes to what he took away from that experience, Smith starts to sound a tad bit cult-y. “I completely released the concept of goal orientation and got into path orientation,” Smith continues. “It is a huge relief for me not to care whether or not [my next movie] ‘Focus’ is No. 1 or No. 10 at the box office. I’ve already gained everything that I could possibly have hoped for from meeting the people that I met and from the creation of what we did together. It’s just painting. I’m going to paint, and some paintings are going to be fantastic, others are going to not be so good. But I no longer measure the quality of my self on whether or not somebody else thinks what I paint is beautiful.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess his producers — and Warner Bros., the studio behind “Focus” — do actually care how the movie does, though.

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