W OLD-SCHOOL A-LIST STARS HAVE GIVEN WAY TO TENTPOLE FRANCHISES
The box office used to be all about the likes of Clark Gable, Julia Roberts or Will Smith. Now, the big names are Captain America and Deadpool
ill Smith, Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson ruled the box office in 1996. A decade later, it was Johnny Depp, Ben Stiller and Tom Hanks.
In 2016? Chris Evans, Felicity Jones and a masked Ryan Reynolds — or, more specifically, Captain America, Jyn Erso and Deadpool.
Decades of Hollywood A-lister influence seems to be dwindling while event film franchises along the lines of Star Wars and Marvel superhero projects have taken over.
“On the back of a big star, you could market your way to a big first weekend before social media. People just would say, ‘It’s the new Julia Roberts movie, let’s go see it,’ ” says comScore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian, referring to a simpler time when trailers and commercials informed moviegoers rather than widespread Internet scuttlebutt and early reviews. “The star power now is the collective power of the stars, the brand, the writing, the release date. If a big star happens to be in the movie, that’s icing on the cake.” Rogue One: A Star Wars Story has blasted the competition for three weeks running, racking up $425 million with Jones and a cast of mid-level actors and relative unknowns. Meanwhile, the holiday movie
Collateral Beauty — featuring Smith, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, Helen Mirren and Keira Knightley (who have 18 Oscar nominations among them) — could muster only $25.8 million.
Even more baffling for onlookers might be Passengers, the sci-fi romance with top talent Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence that’s hauled in a mere $61.5 million.
Two star vehicles expand nationwide Jan. 13, Mark Wahlberg ’s Patriots Day and Ben
Affleck’s Live by Night, but even those two actors are in huge 2017 tentpole films that are much bigger deals: Wahlberg in Transformers: The Last Knight (in theaters June 23), Affleck in Justice League (Nov. 17). Last year registered a historic $11.37 billion in box office, though the most famous name in the biggest movie — Ellen DeGeneres in
Finding Dory ($486.3 million) — voiced a talking fish. Nearly half of the top 10 films were superhero projects, and one of them, the surprise hit Deadpool ($363.1 million), covered up Reynolds’ face for much of its running time. It’s a definite turn from 20 years ago, when Smith fought aliens in the chart-topping
Independence Day ($306.2 million) and Cruise had a pair of home runs with Mission: Impossible ($181 million) and Jerry Ma
guire ($154 million). Back then, a bankable actor or actress was “as close as there is to a sure thing in Hollywood,” says film historian Leonard Maltin, who writes about movies at LeonardMaltin.com. “But the playing field has changed. If you have a great concept or an intriguing premise, and you present it well in your advertising and trailers, you can have a hit without a movie star.”
That’s not to say extinction is imminent: Movie stars will always matter because of society’s high level of interest in celebrity, says Erik Davis, managing editor of Fandango.com and Movies.com. “We have several magazines devoted to them and their lives and what they do every single day.”
But because we’re in the age of the “cinematic universe” and have seen the rise of Marvel Studios, “it’s become more about the character than it is who’s playing them,” Davis adds. “Seeing Captain America and Iron Man battle each other is more of a draw than the fact that it’s Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr., especially for a younger audience (that didn’t grow up) in the era where it was all about the movie star.”
In the golden age of Hollywood, studios would roll out three Clark Gable, four Joan Crawford and three Humphrey Bogart movies a year, “and the only question was the degree of success, not whether they would be successful,” Maltin says. A similar cycle saw the emergence of action stars of the 1970s and ’80s such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris. “Their films could be sold worldwide off the strength of their name.”
Depp, Cruise, Roberts and Leonardo DiCaprio replaced them as must-see superstars, but the tide shifted away from individuals and toward franchises in the 2000s. Dergarabedian says 2001’s The
Fast and the Furious was a watershed moment, founding an action movie series with then-unknowns Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. “When the ensemble star power becomes woven into the DNA of why people like a particular franchise, then that star power works.” Davis points to the early Spi
der-Man and X-Men comic-book movies and other “fan-driven” properties of that period like
Harry Potter, “when it became less about who’s leading the movie and more about ‘What characters will they add to the next one?’ ”
One positive about this trend is the move toward meritocracy and away from just having the biggest star possible, Dergarabedian says. “Nobody’s going to be happy about spending 10 bucks on a
movie, no matter who’s starring in it, to just stare at a pretty face for two hours. You want a good movie.”
Major-league actors and actresses understand that and are more than ever flocking to franchise fare. “The smart ones see the writing on the wall and don’t let their egos get in their way,” says Maltin. Affleck parlayed playing the cowled half of Batman
v Superman: Dawn of Justice this year into plans to direct his own Dark Knight movie, and Suicide
Squad gave ensemble roles to heavy hitters like Smith, Viola Davis and Jared Leto alongside up-andcomer Margot Robbie.
“I definitely think Will Smith is looking at his career right now and he’s not opening movies the way he used to,” Davis says. “He’s looking around at some of these veteran actors like Downey who are finding a second career in these cinematic universes.”
Both Pratt and Lawrence became sensations thanks to franchises — he with Guardians of the
Galaxy, she with The Hunger Games and X-Men. But unfortunately with Passengers, they “just turned up in a movie people didn’t want to see,” says Maltin. “There are no rules and there no formulas. Margot Robbie is still not a household name and people will say she was largely responsi- ble for the success of Suicide
Squad because of the gusto she brought to her character. But does that make her a movie star who’s going to sell tickets? We don’t know.” While Marvel, DC and Star
Wars emphasize new talent for their sagas, Paramount has made Wahlberg the face of its blockbuster transforming-robot series and Davis says Universal Studios is “looking to the true movie star” for its fledgling monster-centric universe, with Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe sharing screen time for The Mummy (out June 9). “Tom Cruise being in The
Mummy, that broadens his horizons,” adds Dergarabedian.
Ironically, while tentpole films are overshadowing an older generation of stars, they’re also creating new ones.
Marvel’s casting of Downey in 2008 with the first Iron Man set “a high casting bar” for the fledgling universe, producer and Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige told USA TODAY last year, and it’s laid the groundwork for fleshing out a growing cast of characters with newcomers such as Captain Mar
vel star Brie Larson, an indie-film darling and best actress Oscar winner for Room who “knows and understands and takes to heart the importance of what (her) movie is.”
Davis predicts that the next round of A-listers will consist mainly of women and people of color; indeed, Larson, Chadwick Boseman ( Black Pan
ther) and Tessa Thompson ( Thor:
Ragnarok) will be using superhero vehicles to launch their careers to the next level just as Daisy Ridley and John Boyega did with Star Wars: The Force
Awakens a year ago. “Instead of doubling down and giving Jennifer Lawrence $20 million to do a movie,” Davis says, “Marvel can go into these film festivals and find talent and put them in one of their movies and have Downey show up for five minutes. And it does really well, and then (a younger actor becomes) a star.”
“Nobody’s going to be happy about spending 10 bucks on a movie, no matter who’s starring in it, to just stare at a pretty face for two hours. You want a good movie.” comScore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian