Will Smith's New Amazon Action Thriller Recruits Rebellious Netflix Star

Will Smith has spent the past couple of years easing back toward the star vehicles that built his name, and his next one is shaping up as a real test of whether that pull still works outside a familiar franchise. The catch, for anyone hoping to see it on the big screen, is that it won’t be playing there at all.

Supermax, the action thriller Amazon MGM Studios locked down for a reported $70 million back in May, is a streaming play, bound for Prime Video in more than 240 countries rather than a theatrical run. David Gordon Green, fresh off directing Prime Video’s Nicole Kidman crime series Scarpetta, is behind the camera on a twist-heavy story that sends two FBI agents into the world’s most secure prison to investigate a murder. Smith plays one of them, an investigator named Rex, and for weeks we’ve been left to wonder who would carry the second badge.

Now, AnnaSophia Robb has officially joined the film as Smith’s young FBI partner, according to Deadline, taking the female co-lead in what marks Smith’s first non-franchise studio feature in some time.

For Robb, this is a move from one streaming hit to the next. She earned some of her strongest reviews as Summer McBride in Netflix’s Rebel Ridge, Jeremy Saulnier’s slow-burn 2024 thriller, after a childhood run that took in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Bridge to Terabithia, and Soul Surfer. Supermax also slots in just ahead of I Play Rocky, the Sylvester Stallone origin biopic in which she plays his first wife, Sasha Czack, giving her two Amazon MGM titles on the near horizon.

Skipping cinemas for a Will Smith action movie, particularly one carrying a $70 million price tag, looks like a bet on global reach over box-office prestige, and it’s a bet plenty of fans would rather the studio wasn’t making. Much of Smith’s action career has been built on opening-weekend spectacle, and his recent output has leaned on established brands, from the Bad Boys films to a long-teased return to Men in Black, which makes an original like this both a bigger swing and a more modest release.

Josh Hutcherson and AnnaSophia Robb in Bridge to Terabithia. — Josh Hutcherson and AnnaSophia Robb in *Bridge to Terabithia*.

Production is set to begin in mid-August, which puts a firmer floor under a project that has moved fast since the Cannes market. Green reunites with co-writers David Weil and David J. Rosen, the Hunters pair behind the script, while The Picture Company’s Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman produce alongside Smith and Adam Fishbach for Westbrook. Whether the finished film earns that decision to bypass theaters is a question for release day, though with cameras about to roll and both leads locked, Supermax has finally started to feel like a real movie.