Will Smith’s slavery biopic, Emancipation— long thought to be a major awards contender– has been delayed to 2023…and it may be due to the Oscars slap.
According to Variety, the film starring Smith as “Whipped Peter,” a runaway slave who became a poster child for the 19th-century abolitionist movement, will be pushed back to 2023.
It was supposed to be released this year.
While Apple hasn’t released a new official date for the film next year, Variety reports that a source said it’s more than likely that the film, which was a highly contested commodity for studios before it settled at Apple, will not come to Apple+ anytime in 2022. This is a possible loss for Smith, since Variety also reports that one filmmaker who had seen early footage of the film said that Smith would have been poised to win another Oscar for his performance.
It's believed that Apple is pushing the film back because of the fallout from Smith's decision to slap Chris Rock at the Oscars. Smith had since been banned from attending the Oscars for the next 10 years.
However, it’s also believed that director Antoine Fuqua wouldn’t have been finished with the film regardless. Variety’s sources said that Fuqua was still in post-production, and the film had dealt with multiple delays from moving the production to Georgia to Louisiana to protest Georgia’s state voting restriction laws. Other delays came from damage from Hurricane Ida and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Smith spoke about the film last year:
In a prior interview with GQ, he said that his film will have a lot more “love” in the film than Quentin Tarantino’s film about a former slave who goes after the evil Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the slaveowner who bought Django’s wife (Kerry Washington). Smith was initially expected to star in Django, but he turned it down.
"I didn't want to make a slavery film about vengeance," he said, adding that for him, the Django story was nearly perfect except for Tarantino's focus on revenge.
“To me, it’s as perfect a story as you could ever want: a guy that learns how to kill to retrieve his wife that has been taken as a slave. That idea is perfect. And it was just that Quentin and I couldn’t see [eye to eye],” he continued. “I wanted to make that movie so badly, but I felt the only way was, it had to be a love story, not a vengeance story.”
Emancipation will star Smith as a slave named Peter who escapes his plantation after being nearly whipped to death. Peter eventually joins the Union Army and fights in the Civil War before becoming a symbol of the growing abolitionist movement of the 1800s. The film is based on the true story about “Whipped Peter.”
Emancipation, he said, gave him the emotional side he wanted from Django, saying, “This was one that was about love and the power of Black love. And that was something that I could rock with. We were going to make a story about how Black love makes us invincible.”
