All Eyez on Me (film)
The film stars Demetrius Shipp Jr. as Tupac, with Kat Graham, Lauren Cohan, Hill Harper, and Danai Gurira.The film languished in development hell for several years with various directors, including Antoine Fuqua and John Singleton, attached at different points before Boom was confirmed in November 2015.That December, Shipp Jr., whose father worked on music videos with Shakur, was cast as the rapper and principal photography began that month.Mean, a member of 2Pac's group called, "Outlawz" intervene when two white male off-duty police officers assault a black man, Tupac is arrested for shooting at the cops.On September 7, 1996, Tupac, Suge, and other members of the Mob Pirus are leaving the Mike Tyson vs. Bruce Seldon boxing match at the MGM Grand Las Vegas.They confront a Southside Compton Crips gang member named Orlando Anderson who had jumped a friend, and Tupac knocks him to the ground, leading to a brawl.[20] Antoine Fuqua was attached as the director of the film, and the script was written by Steven Bagatourian, Stephen J. Rivele, and Christopher Wilkinson.[23] On April 7, 2015, it was revealed that Singleton had exited the film due to major creative differences, while Carl Franklin was being eyed to direct instead.[5][6] On January 11, 2016, Danai Gurira was added to the film's cast to play Tupac's mother Afeni Shakur, a political activist and member of the Black Panther Party.[7] Variety reported the next day that Kat Graham had signed on to play Jada Pinkett, a friend of Tupac from the Baltimore School for the Arts.[1] In North America, All Eyez on Me was released on June 16, 2017, alongside Rough Night, 47 Meters Down and Cars 3, and was projected to gross $17–20 million from 2,471 theatres in its opening weekend.The website's critical consensus reads, "Despite Demetrius Shipp Jr.'s fine lead performance, All Eyez on Me is mostly a surface-skimming, by-the-numbers biopic of a larger-than-life icon."[40] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating, the film has a weighted average score of 38 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews"."[42] Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote: "Comprehensive but sketchy, richly atmospheric but often under-dramatized, it is not, in the end, a very good movie (there are a few scenes, like Tupac's initial meeting with Ted Field of Interscope Records, that are embarrassingly bad).Yet it's highly worth seeing because in its volatility and hunger, and the desperation of its violence, it captures something about the space in which Tupac Shakur lived: a place that wanted to be all about pride and power, but was really about flying over the abyss.