[3] Tim Thomas, sending a text message while driving, caused a car crash in which seven people died: six strangers and his fiancee, Sarah Jenson.

A year after the crash, having quit his job as an aeronautical engineer, Tim donates a lung lobe to his brother Ben, an IRS employee.

He then contacts Emily Posa, a self-employed greeting card printer who has a heart condition and a rare blood type.

His friend Dan acts as executor to ensure that his organs are donated, his heart to Emily and his corneas to Ezra.

[6] In September 2007, director Gabriele Muccino, who worked with Smith on The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), was attached to direct Seven Pounds, bringing along his creative team from the 2006 film.

[8] Smith described the reason he took on the role: Usually with the films that I make there are ideas that I connect to, but lately I've been dealing with the bittersweet in life because it feels more natural.

[citation needed] Before the film's release, the title Seven Pounds was considered a "mystery" which the studio refused to explain.

In an interview Will Smith said that the title is a reference to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which a debtor must pay a pound of flesh.

[11] In this case, it amounts to seven gifts to seven individuals deemed worthy by Smith's character, to atone for seven deaths he caused.

Seven Pounds was promoted on a five-city tour across the United States in November 2008, screening in Cleveland, Miami, Dallas, St. Louis, and Denver to raise funds for food banks in each region.

"[14] The actor sought to "get reacquainted" with an America that he felt had an "openness to change" with the country's election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president.

The website's critics consensus reads, "Grim and morose, Seven Pounds is also undone by an illogical plot.

"[19] A. O. Scott, writing for The New York Times, said that the movie "may be among the most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made.

"[22] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times commented on the fact that the audience is kept completely out of the loop as to what Ben is doing, comparing the film to Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, pointing out how he "finds this more interesting than a movie about a man whose nature and objectives are made clear in the first five minutes, in a plot that simply points him straight ahead.