Will Smith may have slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, but, ultimately, it’s his own public image that has taken a hit.
via: Variety
Data provided exclusively to Variety Intelligence Platform from Q Scores, the longtime industry standard for quantifying celebrities’ star power and appeal, indicates Smith’s numbers tanked months after the March 27 Academy Awards ceremony, when the actor smacked presenter Chris Rock on live TV.
Before the incident, Smith consistently ranked among the country’s top 5 or 10 most positively rated actors in Q Scores’ semiannual surveys (fielded every January and July), which poll 1,800 U.S. consumers ages 6 and up. This placed him alongside such beloved figures as Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, according to Henry Schafer, executive VP of Q Scores.
But between Q Scores’ January survey, conducted before the Oscars, and its July polling, the first following the slap, Smith’s positive Q Score plummeted from a stellar 39 to 24, which Schafer characterized as “a very significant and precipitous decline.” (A positive Q Score of 24 means 24 percent of those surveyed who know of Smith count him as one of their favorite personalities.)
At the same time, Smith’s negative rating (those surveyed whose opinion of him was “fair” or “poor”) more than doubled, from less than 10 to 26. The average negative Q Score, according to Schafer, is about 16 or 17.
Nor was the fallout limited to one Smith: Jada Pinkett Smith, the actor’s wife, also saw significant damage to her public image in recent months. Her positive score, already low at 13, fell to 6, and her negative score jumped from 29 to 44.
In contrast, Rock saw no effect. Between January and July, his positive and negative scores remained at 20 and 14, respectively. However, his ranking on a separate Q Scores scale, one gauging a celebrity’s level of public awareness, leaped from 66 to 84.
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