Avengers: Endgame might be the highest-grossing film in the land, but it just lost one of its records. Believe it or not, Aladdin is still showing in some theatres and has since toppled Endgame as the longest-showing film of 2019. Released on May 24th, the Guy Ritchie film has now run for 143 days. As of Thursday, Aladdin was still being shown on 105 screens around the country. When it comes to the box office earnings, it wasn’t a competition. In its record-breaking run, Avengers: Endgame ended up grossing a whopping $2.79 billion worldwide by Aladdin only tallied $1.05b in box office receipts.
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When we spoke with Aladdin producer Dan Lin ahead of the film’s home media release, he revealed it was a sigh of relief when Will Smith finally signed on board the project.
“I mean, we’re just so fortunate we got Will,” Lin said. “As has been publicized, he passed at first and then he thought about it some more. I think Jaden [Smith] may have influenced him, and encouraged his role in this movie, but that’s the only way that you can cast this movie, which is with the biggest movie star in the world. And it’s a role that is so complex because it requires singing and dancing, high expectations, it requires comedy, it requires drama. It really requires kind of the full skill set of an actor, and he pulled it off. And how he did that was he made it really personal. I think that’s the number one overarching theme that everyone brought the movie. They they made this movie by bringing their personality to it.”
“And so Will Smith, if you look closely at the Genie, is influenced by what he did so well in Hitch and what he did so well with Fresh Prince,” the producer continued. “This is a hip hop genie and so it’s very specific to Will. No other actor could have done this the way he did, in the same way no other actor could have done the genie the way Robin Williams did. They are so iconic and so the way Will interpreted the Genie was to make an iconic character that only he can play that is very true to himself. And that’s what really excited us and allowed us to differentiate and stand out from the previous Aladdin movie.”
Aladdin continues its monstrous theatrical release while Avengers: Endgame is now available digitally and on physical home media release.
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