They’ll be back — fading stars look to shine
Actors re-live glory days with sequels
Question: If you’re a fading Hollywood star, how do you revive your career?
Answer: You return to your greatest triumphs, even though you may now be a bit long in the tooth for this sort of thing.
Consider Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s been getting an easy ride from critics assessing his latest foray into the Terminator franchise. Indeed, they seem a lot more tolerant of his robotic reincarnation in the recently unveiled Terminator Genisys than they are of the movie itself.
How well it ultimately does financially remains a matter for conjecture — it’s opening box office did not break the bank — but for the star it has seemed the surest way of dealing with his sagging box office clout.
At 67, he’s also preparing to revisit another of his great successes — as Conan The Barbarian. Does he see this as a further safe career haven after the generally miserable quality of the movies he has made since stepping down as governor of California?
It’s a common Hollywood phenomenon — this tendency of fading stars to return to the scene of earlier triumphs. And almost always, these moves hint of serious career troubles.
Jim Carrey’s star power was dimming when he and Jeff Daniels recently revisited their Dumb and Dumber success — this time as middle-aged goofballs.
Johnny Depp’s box office track record outside the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has been dismal — which is why at the age of 52 he’s returning to the role of the eternally youthful Capt. Jack Sparrow in Dead Men Tell No Tales.
Years ago, that often caustic Hollywood watcher William Goldman asserted that movie studios constantly search for “lost magic.” In his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, the screenwriter of Butch Cassidy, Marathon Man and others argues that if you cast Burt Reynolds in Smokey And The Bandit 12, you are dealing with “pre-sold” merchandise. “There is a huge audience out there waiting for it (or at least there has been in the past … and if you’re the studio, you feel it must be out there still …)”
But if you’re a fading star, it may also seem like a desperate search for a raft.
Schwarzenegger is not a celebrity who will admit to any lack of self-confidence, but those of us with long memories will recall that, back in 1991, he seemed pretty certain that James Cameron’s monumental Terminator 2: Judgment Day would mark his final entry into cyborg territory. Twelve years later, after a succession of embarrassing duds, he changed his mind. He needed a career restorative, but he drove a hard bargain before he agreed to appear in Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines.
He received $20 million up front, and a further $1.5 million of the film’s budget was reserved for his private jet, private gymnasium, luxury hotel accommodation and personal bodyguards. And, oh yes, he would get 20 per cent of gross ticket and DVD sales plus other perks as well.
These demands constituted a reminder to Hollywood that he still had power in Tinseltown provided he anchored them to an enormously lucrative franchise. But shrewd player that he was, he also used the release of that movie to his advantage politically. Several pages of the press notes for Terminator 3 read like an election platform, and not long afterward, Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy for the governorship of California.
His latest Terminator movie seems like an attempt at another career restorative, but he’s not alone in defying time’s passage by reaching into the past. It seems 70-plus Harrison Ford has been lately musing about having yet another kick at the Indiana Jones can. This is causing a lot of chuckles, given that Ford insisted in 1989 that the franchise was finished — that after the release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the third adventure in the series, Indie’s bullwhip and battered hat would be put away for good. But then, years later, Ford started hinting he might be prepared to take on the role again. He was in a precarious position — a star who could badly use a hit after the disappointments of Random Hearts and Hollywood Homicide. So finally, in 2008, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull happened — accompanied by a bit of added insurance in the casting of Shia LaBeouf in order to attract younger filmgoers who no longer might know who the 65-year-old Ford was.
This was a time when other fading celebrities were also trying to recycle past fame (Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee 3) or past notoriety (50-year-old Sharon Stone going the voluptuous route again in Basic Instinct 2). The entertainment weekly Variety was amused at such geriatric defiance of time. “Apparently, Hollywood believes that it’s never too late,” it chortled. It also suggested that if the stars and producers of these films had waited any longer “the sequels would have to be set in an old folks home.”
Tom Cruise, now 53, is the latest star to seek rejuvenation in the past. This year’s release of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation may ease the embarrassment of Edge of Tomorrow and Oblivion. But Cruise also plans to revisit his 24-year-old self — well, in spirit, anyway — with Top Gun 2.
And what about Eddie Murphy, who’s in increasing danger of primarily remembered as the voice of Donkey in the Shrek movies? For years, we have been told his career decline will be arrested once Beverly Hills Cop 4 happened — but that project seems forever mired in development hell. So instead, Murphy is setting out to make Triplets — director Ivan Reitman’s sequel to the 1988 Twins. In this one, the improbable siblings we met in the original now discover they have another brother, played by Murphy. And who will be re-creating their original roles as the twins? Well, there’s Danny DeVito, whose own career has been going nowhere. And then there’s also this guy who’s clearly enraptured with the gold of yesteryear — Arnold Schwarzenegger.