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28th Screen Actors Guild Awards - Red Carpet

Source: Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty

The consequences of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Academy Awards last week are beginning to stack up, as Netflix is reportedly halting work on a project with the actor.

According to an exclusive report, the streaming giant has quietly halted forward progress on a film project Smith was attached to. The film, titled Fast and Loose, had already lost its first director of choice in David Leitch. Leitch had made the decision to leave the film the week before the Academy Awards took place in order to be the director for the movie Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling. That movie, produced by Universal, is set to begin production in August.

Fast and Loose was set to have Smith play a crime boss who loses his memory in the wake of an attack, who goes on to discover that he has a double identity as a crime kingpin and a down on his luck CIA agent. Netflix had begun a search for a new director, but after the incident, they’ve reportedly retracted those calls.

The situation doesn’t bode well for the King Richard actor, who stormed the stage to strike the comedian at last Sunday’s (March 28th) Oscars after he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s hairstyle while presenting the award for Best Documentary Feature. The incident has caused others to put a pause on projects involving Smith. Sony has reportedly decided to pause production on Bad Boys 4 with Martin Lawrence in the aftermath of the situation, even though Smith has received a chunk of the script to review according to sources close to the project. And all eyes are on Apple TV concerning the film Emancipation, which features Smith as an enslaved man who escapes the plantation he was on to freedom and a role fighting in the Union Army. The film, directed by Antoine Fuqua, is now in post-production but there are questions as to whether it will be released as first imagined towards the end of this year to be another awards contender. The company so far has offered no comment.