Please Enjoy Will Smith Furiously Powering Through His Hip Hop Version Of ‘Friend Like Me’
That 'Aladdin' remake is starting to look a little more promising.
It has been reasonably hard to know what to make of Disney’s forthcoming live-action Aladdin remake.
Early trailers made the film appear to be less a big-budget CGI spectacle and more of a literal fever dream, complete with the horrifying spectre of a blue Will Smith. Smith, who plays the Genie — a role made famous by Robin Williams — looks like a cross between the Michelin Man and a night terror demon, and spends much of the early marketing material inflating and deflating hideously, like the world’s most traumatising party balloon.
Understandably, ever since the internet reacted with horror at those early sneak peaks, Disney has gone into damage control, dropping a trailer that features a lot more not-blue Will Smith than blue Will Smith, and trundling the actor out on the press circuit to assure viewers that the ole Smith charm is still visible even under layers of CGI.
As part of that press tour, Smith has taken to Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, to both pay tribute to Williams’ version of the character, and to explain how he plans to shake things up a little.
“I met with the directors and I talked about it,” Smith tells Fallon in the clip, talking through his initial reluctance to take on the part. Indeed, apparently it wasn’t ’til conversations turned to the music that Smith found his way into the iconic role. Then, inspired by the drum part from ‘Impeach The President’ by The Honey Drippers, Smith began to play around with the hit song ‘Friend Like Me’.
“It’s singing, dancing, rapping, acting,” Smith says of his work in the film.
“There’s elephants, there’s monkeys,” Fallon helpfully interjects.
Sounds like Aladdin really does have it all. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see if the film delivers on all this early promise when it hits Australian cinemas on Thursday May 23.