Will Smith is the undisputed king of the July 4 weekend movie blockbuster — and this year is no different.

In his latest film, “Hancock,” Smith plays a superhero with a mysterious past and a bad attitude. The actor refers to the title role as a “bum superhero”

“He is rude. Mean to kids,” he told Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith. “Like that was so bizarre and opposite to, you know, what my natural instincts (are). It actually was difficult for the first couple of weeks, but actually turned into one of those guilty pleasures.” (more…)

Jamie Foxx, Amanda Peet, Chris Daughtry, Queen Latifah and a very pregnant Minnie Driver turned up at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre Monday night to watch Will Smith save the world once again, this time as an ambivalent superhero in Hancock.

But where was Smith’s main man, Tom Cruise, who has turned up at almost every one of Smith’s movie premieres since Cruise and Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, co-starred in 2004’s Collateral?

“He still had some things to do for Valkyrie,” said Pinkett Smith of her friend’s 2009 Adolf Hitler assassination plot drama. “But he let us know, ‘Sorry, I can’t make it tonight.’ ”

Pinkett Smith wowed in a jade Herve Leroux gown, while her husband called himself “aggressive” for turning up in a Tom Ford checkered suit. “I was feeling sexy about myself,” said Smith, 39. (more…)

Hancock is the superhero nobody likes. Oh, he can fly; his chest does repel point-blank bullets. And he saves people, averts catastrophe, stops bad guys from doing bad things. But Hancock has a personality defect: he’s a horrible human being/deity. He guzzles way too much Royal Crown, which puts him in a perpetually bad mood and interferes with his self-aviation skills — the man is a drunk flyer. (And then he lands so hard on a street, he digs a ditch in the asphalt.) He wrecks everything he touches. When he’s finished a mission, all of L.A. has become collateral damage. Once Hancock was summoned to the aid of a whale that had washed up on the beach. When he lifted the creature by its tail and tossed it back in the sea, it landed on a distant ship. “I don’t remember that,” he says to somebody, who replies, “Greenpeace does.” (more…)

GALLERY LINKS:
• Appearances from 2008 - “Hancock” - Los Angeles Premiere