“Bad Boys: Ride or Die” made waves at the box office over the weekend after a fairly slow start to the summer movie season.
The film beat revenue projections, bringing in $104 million globally, which includes $48.6 million at the international box office. That number is 58% higher than Memorial Day weekend’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Story,” per Deadline.
“Ride or Die” is the fourth installment in the Will Smith/Martin Lawrence-led franchise. It was released by Sony Pictures, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah.
This is Smith’s first major release since the infamous slapping incident at the 2022 Oscars, which tarnished the actor’s reputation in Hollywood. “Ride or Die” was already in production at the time of the slap and ultimately went on with a $100 million production budget.
It was made public ahead of time that the film would reference the Oscars debacle. Smith’s character, Mike Lowrey, gets slapped repeatedly by Martin Lawrence’s character, Marcus Burnett. Lowrey is having a panic attack, and Burnett smacks him in the face multiple times to snap him out of it.
Arbi and Fallah acknowledged that the slapping was intentional.
“Well, I think you know, if you watch the movie, you see that there are some parallels between what’s happening in the movie and real life,” they told UNILAD in an interview. “You know, there’s — it’s almost like a meta experience that that Will in the character of Mike Lowrey goes through with some themes.”
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“So obviously, it had something, there is a connection between real life and the story of the movie in the movie itself,” the pair went on.
The critics seemed to appreciate the addition, too. Variety reviewer Owen Gleiberman called the slapping scene a “direct reference” to the Oscars, further describing it as “a kind of pop exorcism.”
“It’s ‘punishing’ Smith, making cruel fun of his transgression, and just maybe, in the process, allowing him to crawl out from under the image of it,” Gleiberman wrote.
New York Post reviewer Johnny Oleksinski wrote, “The best part of ‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’ arrives near the end of the film when Martin Lawrence slaps Will Smith in the face and yells ‘bad boy!’ What a shame that it’s fake.”
Smith was banned from the Oscars for ten years after storming onto the stage and slapping host Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.