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).
Just one year after starring in the lowest-scoring film of his career, Smith returned in 2017 with his second-worst effort—the only time he ever appeared in back-to-back critical duds (unless you count his cameo appearance in 2014's Winter's Tale, which followed the abysmal After Earth). The straight-to-Netflix Bright (at the time the streaming service's most expensive original production, though it has since been surpassed by several newer films) reunited Smith with his Suicide Squad director David Ayer for a fantastical action-thriller set in a world where mythical beasts co-exist with humans. Will Smith, falling into the latter category, plays an LAPD cop alongside an orc partner played by Joel Edgerton. Netflix doesn't like to reveal exact viewership numbers, but Bright appears to be one of the service's most-viewed original films, and a sequel, though delayed, could still head into production at some point in the near future. But reviewers certainly didn't like the film when it debuted, though they reserved much of their criticism for the screenplay by Max Landis.
“Bright pulls off the uncommon (and not at all admirable) hat trick of being confusing, boring, and vaguely insulting about the matters it wants to appear smart on. The movie is a case of reading the room very wrongly, then slapping a lot of violence and muddled mythology on top as a means of distraction.” —Alissa Wilkinson, Vox
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