Jamie Foxx have several Seats! In a new interview with CinemaBlend, Jamie Foxx explained that “All-Star Weekend,” a 2016 comedy where he served as director, remains unreleased due to potential backlash. The cast includes Jeremy Piven, Robert Downey Jr., Benicio del Toro, Gerard Butler and Eva Longoria.
“All-Star Weekend” features Foxx and Piven as friends who score tickets to the yearly NBA event. The pair take a road trip to Los Angeles to attend the All-Star Game, where they come across a slew of characters. One of them is Downey Jr. who portrays a Mexican man. Apparently, Foxx also plays multiple roles which includes a white racist cop.
“It’s been tough with the lay of the land when it comes to comedy,” Foxx explained. “We’re trying to break open the sensitive corners where people go back to laughing again… We hope to keep them laughing and run them right into ‘All-Star Weekend’ because we were definitely going for it.”
Downey Jr. donned blackface in his 2008 satire film Tropic Thunder and was at the center of controversy for it. Foxx, however, believes that this kind of performance is necessary to push boundaries. In a 2017 interview with Joe Rogan, he stated:
“I called Robert, I said, ‘I need you to play a Mexican.’ I said, ‘Shit, you played the Black dude [in ‘Tropic Thunder’] and you killed that shit.’ We got to be able to do characters.”
Later in the Cinemablend interview, he shared how much test audiences loved the film. “The one thing we kept hearing in the screenings was how much people were laughing,” Foxx said. “So, hopefully, we’ll keep them laughing and run them into All-Star Weekend, because we were definitely going for it.”
But nothing about this sounds funny. It’s hard to believe that in 2022, the funniest premise of a film you can think of is a road trip to a basketball event where a white man pretends to be a person of color. There’s too much money put into movies for this to be the best you can come up with: Do better.