Andy Tennant, the director of the rom-com movie Hitch, claims that Will Smith tried to back out just three days before shooting on the film was due to start. The film, which went on to earn over $371 million worldwide, was “fraught with peril”, Business Insider reported Tennant as saying. In the 2000s, when Smith was at the height of his career, scoring box-office hit after box-office hit, with movies like Men In Black, Bad Boys, Independence Day, and I, Robot, he decided to make a switch. He would film a romantic comedy and on top of that a comedy where he plays a professional dating expert. Tennant, whose credits include Sweet Home Alabama and It Takes Two, noted that part of the reason Smith wanted to make the switch was because someone told the actor that “romantic comedies with Black leads don’t travel well overseas.” But, according to Tennant, Smith was so out of his comfort zone he “tried to back out three days before we started shooting. He wanted to shut down and work on it some more. It was madness...” The director also claimed that Smith and he had artistic differences in what each considered funny and added that Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, helped push things along. “The movie I wanted to make and the movie Will wanted to make, neither one of those movies is as good as the movie we made together,” Tennant told Business Insider. That said, Tennant also reported that he hasn’t heard from Smith since the movie’s release in 2005 and learned recently that “Will is developing a Hitch sequel without me.”
