When you're Will Smith and you're not currently attached to any film, life is good.  It's a little less good when the news comes out that your potential Oldboy adaptation with Steven Spielberg is dead and the entire Internet cheers.  But you pick yourself up, say a hearty, "Awhellnaw", and move on to then next project, which could be another adaptation of Daniel Keyes' novel Flowers for Algernon. Hit the jump to pull a hammer out of your skull and raise your IQ.

Latino Review reports the joyous news that Steven Spielberg and Will Smith's planned adaptation of the Japanese manga Oldboy, which was turned into the intensely-loved 2003 film of the same name, will not be happening.  Mandate Pictures and DreamWorks pictures were to secure the rights together, they didn't see eye-to-eye, walked away, and that breeze you felt was every film lover breathing a sigh of relief.

However, Will Smith will not be denied.  Rumored to be in talks for sequels to Independence Day, Men in Black II, and Bad Boys II, Pajiba is reporting that Smith has signed on to produce and star in an adaptation of the weepy story, Flowers for Algernon, which is about Charlie Gordon, a retarded man who undergoes an experiment which makes him brilliant but then he discovers that he will revert back to his original intelligence.  Smith's film would be a modern-day telling so it's possible that after Charlie returns to his original IQ of 68, goes to a rally where he says that health care reform is socialism and that the President is a Nazi.

Pajiba doesn't know where this film would fall into Smith's schedule although they speculate that Smith's Pursuit of Happyness/Seven Pounds director Gabriele Muccino would be a likely candidate to helm the film.  If so, the ending I just put forward would still be a hundred times better than the one for Seven Pounds.