Did ‘South Park’ Inadvertently Make One of Will Smith’s Worst Movies a Hit?

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut was a solid hit when it came out back in the summer of 1999, raking in more than $83 million at the global box office. Pretty good for an R-rated cartoon, but not quite as good as movies like You’ve Got Mail and Stepmom.

But just think of how much money it would have made had everyone that saw the South Park movie in theaters actually bought a ticket for it.

When Bigger, Longer & Uncut was released, a lot of South Park fans under the age of 17 wanted to see the movie, but had trouble buying tickets due to the R rating, which probably wasn’t a shock to creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, considering that the inciting incident of the film’s story involves the kids sneaking into Terrance and Phillip’s R-rated Asses of Fire.

What Parker and Stone couldn’t have anticipated was the fact that there was a “temporary” increase in theaters checking IDs for R-rated movies that summer. Why? Because just two months earlier, the Columbine shooting in Littleton, Colorado led to a national hysteria over the accessibility of violent media. This wasn’t just a new policy for certain movie theaters, it was a directive from the federal government. Just weeks before South Park’s release date, President Bill Clinton reportedly pressured the National Association of Theater Owners to “adopt a new policy requiring youths unaccompanied by adults to produce a photo ID before being admitted to R-rated films.”

As Parker and Stone revealed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, they actually suggested pushing the film’s release back, but were told by the studio: “It’s a shooting, guys. People will get over it.” 

Given the added scrutiny for selling tickets to R-rated movies, minors had to come up with creative ways to get into the theaters playing South Park. Instead of hiring an unhoused person to accompany them, like Stan and Kyle, kids under the age of 17 simply bought tickets to PG movies playing at their local multiplexes, then snuck into the auditorium playing South Park. “We sold a lot of Wild Wild West tickets,” Stone claimed.

Yup, the very same day that South Park hit theaters, Warner Bros. released Wild Wild West, the steampunk Western buddy comedy starring Will Smith, Kevin Kline and a giant mechanical spider that may or may not have been recycled from an unproduced Kevin Smith movie. 

It was a hit, making more than $222 million worldwide. And while Smith was obviously a huge star, coming off of the blockbuster success of Men in Black, the movie itself was a turd. Roger Ebert called it a “tortured attempt at comedy that falls flat in scene after scene.”

In addition to Stone’s claim, the show playfully referenced the possibly misleading success of Wild Wild West in the Season Three episode “Cat Orgy,” which aired just a few weeks after both movies came out. 

While we’ll never know for sure just how much South Park contributed to the financial accomplishments of Wild Wild West, there is at least some concrete evidence to support the theory. One poor kid, who was between 12 and 14, made the news in an article published with the headline “Boy Sidelined From South Park.” “He bought a ticket to see the PG-13-rated Wild Wild West,” the article explained. “But then headed straight toward the theater showing the gutter-humored, R-rated, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.”

It’s unclear what consequences this kid faced, but it’s hard to imagine a worse punishment than forcing him to actually watch Wild Wild West.