*Jamie Foxx is speaking out about why his 2016 comedy “All-Star Weekend” co-starring Jeremy Piven was shelved and cancel culture may have killed the project.
In the film, Foxx and Piven play NBA-obsessed friends who “win tickets to the NBA All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles and on their way out west, they run into a cast of wacky characters and find themselves in a dangerous situation with their hoop idols,” New York Post writes.
Foxx made his directorial debut with the movie, which also features Robert Downey Jr., Benicio del Toro, Gerard Butler and Eva Longoria. Per the report, the movie was slated for release during the 2018 NBA All-Star Weekend but was pushed back to 2019 and now the film has been shelved indefinitely.
Speaking recently to CinemaBlend, Foxx was vague about the status of the film but noted that the comedy climate may be the reason why the public won’t see the film anytime soon.
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“It’s been tough with the lay of the land when it comes to comedy,” Foxx told CinemaBlend when asked about “All-Star Weekend.”
“We’re trying to break open the sensitive corners where people go back to laughing again,” he said.
In the film, Robert Downey Jr. reportedly plays a Mexican man and Foxx plays a “white racist cop.”
“It’s so relevant right now,” Foxx told the Hollywood Reporter about the movie in 2018. “Comedy, right now, needs a movie like ‘All-Star Weekend’ and something you haven’t seen before.”
In the same interview, he said he asked Robert Downey Jr. to play a Mexican in the film after seeing his blackface performance in “Tropic Thunder”. The actor initially agreed but later had second thoughts.
“I said, ‘S–t, you played the black dude and you killed that s–t.’ We got to be able to do characters,” said Foxx about his conversation with Robert.
During an interview with Joe Rogan in 2020, Downey Jr. said most of his Black friends loved his blackface role in “Tropic Thunder.”
“And 90 percent of my black friends were like, ‘Dude, that was great.’ I can’t disagree with [the other 10 percent], but I know where my heart lies,” he explained. “I think that it’s never an excuse to do something that’s out of place and out of its time, but to me it blasted the cap on [the issue]. I think having a moral psychology is job one. Sometimes, you just gotta go, ‘Yeah I effed up.’ In my defense, ‘Tropic Thunder’ is about how wrong [blackface] is, so I take exception.”
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