Every Will Smith Movie, Ranked Worst to Best
Updated December 1, 2022 to add Emancipation.
First rising to fame in the 1980s as the non-DJ half of the hip hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, Will Smith moved into acting in 1990 as the star of the hit NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (soon to be rebooted as a Peacock drama series). He would make his big-screen debut a few years later in a few indie movies before quickly moving to above-the-title stardom with 1995's Bad Boys. He has been a major presence in film ever since, with roles in over 30 films, a pair of Oscar nominations, and a cumulative box office gross of over $4 billion.
His newest film, King Richard, is headed to theaters and HBO Max on November 19th and is expected to be an Oscar contender in multiple categories. How does it compare to his past work? In the gallery on this page, we rank every one of Will Smith's films in order from worst to best by their Metascores, which represent the consensus opinions of top film critics. Note that we have excluded titles where Smith's role was limited to a brief cameo appearance (such as in Winter's Tale, Jersey Girl, and Anchorman 2).
Smith's first film since his infamous slap of Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony was initially dogged by questions about whether the star's antics would doom its Oscar chances. Turns out: Those chances were never all that great to begin with. Antoine Fuqua's historical action-drama—released in theaters and streamed by Apple TV+ in December 2022—finds Smith playing a brutally tortured but newly escaped slave who journeys to the North and joins the Union Army. Though Smith had some approval from critics, those reviewers felt the film as a whole suffers from banality and unrelenting brutality.
“Directed by Antoine Fuqua with an occasionally puzzling combination of restraint and stylization, Emancipation turns a potent image into a pageant of spectacle and suffering.” —Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
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