Is This Will Smith Movie Just A Psy-Op?

By no means do I claim to have an encyclopedic knowledge of film. So it’s not uncommon for me to hear about movies that I’m unfamiliar with. 

When those movies are thoroughly star-studded, packed to the gills with A-list actors at the peak of their careers, however? It’s usually enough to pluck at least some distant string at the back of my brain. After all, it’s tough for something with that much money invested in it to fall into obscurity. One post from Twitter user @i_zzzzzz though, has sent group chats and online denizens to suddenly unearth one such movie that still seems entirely made-up.

The movie in question is 2016’s Collateral Beauty. A name, by itself, that sounds like it would grace some sort of visual gag for an invented New York Times Bestseller with an image of a crushed flower on the cover. I have to imagine that it was meant to be the antonym to collateral damage, which is generous, given that the opposite of “damage” is not “beauty.” The whole thing reeks of whole-cloth invention, something that the replies to the tweet above agree on.

As mentioned in that second tweet, it’s partly the cast that makes it feel so impossible that this movie ever hit theaters without at least a good amount of moviegoers seeing it out of resigned compulsion. Will Smith heading a movie that came out in between Concussion, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination, and Suicide Squad, which, well, didn’t earn any nominations, but was a huge release? That should at least have entered the public consciousness. Especially when Helen Mirren is playing the concept of Death, and Keira Knightley is playing the concept of love. The plot, as @i_zzzzzz helpfully adds, is also completely batshit.

And this isn’t simply a case of time passing and something becoming memory-holed. It’s not like public tastes have just changed enough that this seems like a weird movie to us now. Looking back at Twitter posts from around the movie’s release, the most prominent sentiment is identical: that it sounds like a fake movie, some sort of box-office prank or sneaky tax write-off.

Despite insistences to the contrary, it apparently does exist, and was, get this: awful. It holds a dismal 13 percent score on RottenTomatoes, the kind of score that’s hard to reach by a movie where all the cameras work. This was a movie that was trying to be deeply meaningful, had Helen Mirren in it, and landed two percent above Freddy Got Fingered. Honestly, I think they’d probably prefer that it never existed, and maybe we’ve all been neuralyzed by Will Smith’s PR team.

If you’d like to rewatch it for yourself, and see if it stirs even the slightest memory, get ready to pay up: Collateral Beauty is streaming nowhere — at least for free. You can rent or buy it on Apple TV, Amazon Video or the Microsoft Store (?), at which point I assume the browser will deliver an error message and take you back to the homepage.