One year after Will Smith's Slapgate on stage at the Academy Awards, Chris Rock will repeat the same live on Netflix.
A special, the first of its kind for the streaming giant, will air on Saturday night a week before the Oscars, but the timing, according to the production, is purely coincidental.
"I've been rooting for Will Smith all my life. But I saw Emancipation the other day just to enjoy seeing him whipped," is one of the lines tested by the comedian in a recent performance that could be used in the hour of the show titled Selective Outrage and to air from the Hippodrome Theater in Baltimore.
Emancipation is Smith's last film to play a runaway slave.
Other jokes, according to the Wall Street Journal, would include comments on the difference in size between Chris and Will, his reasons for not reacting to the hot slap and what he thinks really sparked the attack, beyond the joke about the shaved head. of Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett: "We've all been cheated on, but she hurt him more than he hurt me," Rock said recently on another night referring to Jada's relationship with young rapper August Alsina , a revelation that had caused the couple to announce that they were in an open marriage.
The show, the result of a 40 million dollar contract for two shows, is the first live show that Netflix offers to its audience of 231 million subscribers worldwide: therefore a test for new technologies that could make the streaming service qualitative leap in the type of events scheduled compared to the shows to be consumed 'on demand', overeating according to one's tastes and the availability of time.
“We chose an artist who stands on the Mount Rushmore of comedy to create mass momentum and test audience reactions in real time,” said Robbie Praw, Netflix vice president of stand-up and comedy formats.
Rock is in fact one of the giants of laughter: since last March he has taken the stage more than a hundred times, not only in the USA but also in Great Britain, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, earning around 700,000 dollars per evening.
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