Belly (1998) Should’ve Been a Launchpad for a Lengthy Hype Williams Feature Film Career

With a quarter century of hindsight, I think it’s safe to say the 1990s were the golden age of music videos. I fell in love with music videos before I ever fell in love with movies. They were bite-size adventures for my young brain, and they exposed me to so many different styles of music. I devoured them every chance I got, whether it was a VH1 top whatever countdown or the videos du jour on Total Request Live.¹

It’s not just the quality of the product that makes the 90s a music video heyday, though. It’s the fact that these soundtracked short films could launch top-tier visual stylists into a different stratosphere by earning them opportunities to make feature films. Some of our finest turn-of-the-century filmmakers got their start by making iconic music videos. Directors like David Fincher, Spike Jones, Antoine Fuqua, Jonathan Glazer, and F. Gary Gray all crafted some of the decade’s finest music videos before making classic films.

But no one blew my mind more thoroughly and consistently than Hype Williams. His collaborations with Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott in 1996 and 1997 were among the first music videos that made me stop and say “Who did this?”² I’d never seen anything like it. And frankly I don’t think we’ve seen anything quite like it since short of lesser imitations. Nobody is quite like Hype.

And yet, he’s only directed one feature film. For reasons that are as frustrating as they are vague.

To Hype’s credit—and Nas’ as well—Belly has become a cult classic, cited by film fiends and hip-hop heads as a pop culture keystone. I’ll never forget Rembert Browne’s review of 2 Chainz’s 2013 cookbook, which features a teriyaki salmon recipe that encourages at-home chefs to “feel free to watch Belly on the big screen” while their dinner is in the oven.³ It hasn’t gotten a boutique Blu-ray release yet—I could absolutely see the Criterion Collection releasing one—but it did get a nice 4K release in 2023 for its 25th anniversary.⁴

This is not to say that Belly doesn’t have flaws. I consider Nas to be our greatest living rapper, but he isn’t exactly our greatest living actor. Or our greatest living screenwriter, though that’s not completely on him. Williams has sole screenplay credit here, though he shares story credit with Nas and a man named Anthony Bodden who doesn’t have a single other writing credit to his name. There’s not much scholarship out there about Bodden, although this brief write-up from AskHipHop states that he studied screenwriting at UCLA, has collaborated with Tennessee Williams, and “enjoys works by philosophical greats such as Plato.”⁵ Even Bodden’s Instagram page is private, so his career is largely a mystery.

The real stans will assure you that Belly’s narrative shortcomings are more feature than bug, or at least easily ignorable. And they’re right. It’s all about the vibes, the visuals, and the verisimilitude. It’s among the greatest hip-hop films ever made.

It was moderately successful too. Even though it features A-list artists like DMX, T-Boz, and Method Man, Belly is an independent film, scrapped together with just $3 million. It grossed nearly $10 million at the box office, making it not exactly a runaway hit but a financially viable product at least.

Belly did just about everything a director can hope for with a debut feature. Sure, it received some negative reviews, but it proved that Williams’ style could translate to the big screen without costing its investors. So why hasn’t he directed another film in nearly 30 years? It’s a question that’s been raised many times but never really yielded a satisfying answer.

As the story goes, Belly did earn Williams a two-year contract with New Line Cinema. But his first two projects—another feature film and an animated series—both died in development. A few years later, Williams wrote a script for a zombie film called Thrilla and sold it to Disney, but it too never made it past the development stage.⁶ (They call it “development hell” for a reason, folks.)

The most curious note in Williams’ could-be filmography, though, is this: He was one of a handful of directors originally hired to direct Speed Racer. I know that many consider the Wachowskis’ film to be a masterpiece (and I agree that it’s very good), but it’s hard not to wonder what Hype’s vision would’ve brought to that property. Unfortunately, he walked away reportedly over creative differences.

That’s the thing about Hype: He never stopped being creative. He simply went back to his first love and continued to make music videos; his videography is over 200 now. And while his most recent muse Kanye West would go on to obliterate his cultural status for reasons we don’t have time to discuss today, their collaboration on Runaway, West’s 35-minute music film that was anchored by a Williams script, shows that he still knows how to make art beyond his standard five-minute parameters.

It really has been nearly three decades since Belly, though. Maybe Hype simply isn’t interested in having another feature film dream crushed by the studio system, but surely there’s an independent film company out there willing to give him a few million dollars to make a comeback. He’s only 55 after all.

A legacyquel is out of the question.⁷ DMX tragically passed a few years ago, and it just wouldn’t be the same without him.⁸ But I think some sort of spiritual sequel would be a guaranteed hit. Belly showed that Williams understands the game of hip-hop better than just about anyone. And the game needs him now more than ever.

Belly is now streaming on Starz and Philo, and it is available to rent elsewhere.

1. When I was 8 or 9, I also watched a lot of BET music video countdowns. It did not occur to me until a few years later that I was watching exclusively Black artists. I just thought I was being served the hottest thing in music. (And I pretty much was.)

2. I have a fond memory of watching the “California Love” video in my bedroom (again, on BET) and my mother walking in and commenting that it looked “Satanic.” Had I understood the conceit at that age, I could’ve said “It’s not Satan, Mom. It’s Mad Max.”

3. This meal only calls for 20-30 minutes in the oven, which means you’d be able to watch about a third of Belly. But that first act is probably the best one, so it’s still good advice.

4. Belly also seems to be a popular repertory screening at indie cinemas. Shouts out to Dust On The VCR guest writer Anton Jackson, who booked it earlier this year for the Capri Theatre in Montgomery.

5. Yes, that Tennessee Williams. Unless Hype has another nickname that I don’t know about.

6. The producer attached to Thrilla went on to produce Zombieland and its sequel. I wonder if he borrowed some of Hype’s ideas.

7. We will not be acknowledging Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club, which was never intended to be a Belly sequel. Lionsgate simply owned the IP and decided to slap Belly 2 onto the title for marketing purposes.

8. If you haven’t seen DMX: Don’t Try to Understand, released the same year that he died, I would highly recommend it. We didn’t show X enough love when he was with us.