Will Smith got candid when asked why he finally decided to make a movie involving slavery.

Throughout his 30-year career, Will Smith made a conscious decision not to play a slave on film.

After dropping roughly $200 million to acquire the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Killers of the Flowers Moon, and a cool $70 million to take Tom Hanks' WWII movie Greyhound off of Sony's hands, Apple has shelled out approximately $120 million for Will Smith's emotional action thriller Emancipation, in which he'll play a runaway slave. Antoine Fuqua will direct from a script by William N. Collage (Exodus: Gods and Kings), who drew from historical documents in telling the harrowing true story of Peter, a slave on a Louisiana plantation. After receiving a brutal whipping by one of the plantation'…

Nearly a decade after passing on the title role in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, Will Smith has signed on to play a runaway slave in Antoine Fuqua's action thriller Emancipation, which is being described as being closer in tone to Apocalypto than 12 Years a Slave. Bill Collage (Exodus: Gods and Kings) wrote the script, which is based on the harrowing true story of Peter, a runaway slave whose "scourged back" went viral, in a sense, all the way back in 1863. Peter was a slave on a Louisiana plantation owned by John and Bridget Lyons and he …

During the middle of Game of Thrones, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss announced their upcoming HBO follow-up: Confederate, an alternate-history sci-fi series positing a future where the South did not lose the Civil War, and slavery still exists as an institution in modern day America. This idea is, as you are undoubtedly feeling based on your increased heart-rate and sweaty brow, incendiary at best and tasteless at worse -- particularly coming from two white, male showrunners whose show was often derided for its poor depictions of women and POC. Since then, the two have …

The controversial HBO show Confederate from Game of Thrones' Benioff and Weiss, about an alternate history where the South won the war, is cancelled.