Will Smith has accomplished a lot during his time in the spotlight, and gotten a lot of recognition for those accomplishments. In his acting career alone, he’s been nominated for five Golden Globe Awards and two Academy Awards. Now, he’s about to get even more recognition. The MTV Movie Awards is giving Smith its Generation Award at the next ceremony.
MTV confirmed to CinemaBlend today that Will Smith will be the next recipient of their Generation Award, which will be handed out April 10 at the 2016 MTV Movie Awards. The ceremony, which will be hosted by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Kevin Hart, marks the 25th anniversary of the award show. Smith has been nominated for 17 MTV Movie Awards over the years, and won five times. He won Best Male Performance twice, for Ali and I Am Legend.
Will Smith started off as everyone’s favorite happy-go-lucky hip hop star, and quickly became a big household name when he landed his own sitcom, NBC’s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which lasted from 1990 through 1996, and has continued to air in syndication since then. The likeability he built with his hip hop career transferred easily to the small screen, and that lead directly to his long career as a film star.
While still working on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Will Smith began to branch out into film work. He took some early chances with Where the Day Takes You, a drama about teenage runaways in Los Angeles, and Six Degrees of Separation, where he played a con man who excelled at convincing a rich couple that he was way more important than he really was. His first major film hit came with Bad Boys in 1995, which grossed almost $142 million worldwide.
For someone who has less than 50 movie credits to his name, Will Smith’s film career has been incredibly successful. He’s had some of the biggest film hits of the past two decades. His star power helped drive the box office of films like Independence Day, the Bad Boys franchise, the three Men in Black films, and Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness, for which Smith received his Oscar nods.
Will Smith is the only actor to have eight consecutive films open at number one domestically, eleven consecutive movies gross over $150 million internationally and eight consecutive films that grossed over $100 million in the U.S. By 2014, Smith had the distinction of having 17 of the 21 films that he’d had leading roles in gross over $100 million each, and five of those making over $500 million globally. As of that same year, his movies had grossed over $6 billion worldwide.
The MTV Generation Award is the highest honor of the MTV Movie Awards. And, seeing as how the award is only given to actors who create "an amazing body of work throughout their career that speaks directly to the MTV audience," Will Smith is certainly the right person to receive the award this year. Past recipients have included Jamie Foxx, Sandra Bullock, Tom Cruise and Jim Carrey. Smith is still working his ass off to bring us entertaining films, and his blockbuster days are far from being behind him. He can next be seen in Suicide Squad, which hits theaters on August 5, 2016.
