BIG STARS, BIG FLOPS
Hollywood elite fails to deliver
Here’s an easy one: What do George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Reese Witherspoon, Adam Sandler, Mila Kunis, Hugh Jackman and Bradley Cooper have in common?
They’re some of the highestpaid hotshots in Hollywood, of course.
But they’re members of another group, too — paragons of Tinseltown nobility who have headlined some of the biggest box office flops of the year. And they’re not the only A-listers who have failed to get moviegoers to theatres.
A year of high-profile bombs that kicked off with Mortdecai and Jupiter Ascending has culminated in a few more failures in the past couple of weeks. By the Sea (in select theatres) barely made a splash despite the star power of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Our Brand Is Crisis tanked, even though it stars Sandra Bullock. And last weekend, the combined wattage of Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman and Chiwetel Ejiofor wasn’t enough to get audiences interested in Secret in Their Eyes.
It isn’t always an actor’s fault if his or her movie doesn’t click with audiences. After all, no one is going to blame Emma Stone for Aloha. (That was clearly Cameron Crowe’s mess.) It usually takes a village to ruin a movie.
But the fact that 2015’s biggest debacles feature so many highprofile stars prompts a question: Why do studios put so much faith in big-name actors when they clearly aren’t reliable moneymakers?
The belief that a movie is only marketable if it has a major star is antiquated but also stubbornly commonplace. Look at Ridley Scott’s explanation for his casting choices in Exodus: Gods and Kings, for example. When people complained that all the Egyptians were played by white men, the director explained to Variety: “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-andso from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.”
Sure, Scott is passing the buck, but he has a point: Studios are clinging to an old paradigm. Investors shy away from movies without a household name attached, which is why Scott cast Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton to play Moses and Ramses.
The punchline? The movie brought in only $65 million in the U.S. and Canada. And while it did better abroad, ticket sales weren’t enough to recoup the $140-million budget plus marketing costs, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
This should be a teachable moment, but most studios aren’t learning anything from the mounting evidence. They just keep looking backward.
Not that long ago, actors were enough to sell tickets. People used to say they were heading to “the new Tom Hanks movie,” as if the star of a film trumped the subject matter. But we don’t talk in those terms anymore. No one calls Jurassic World “that Chris Pratt movie.” If anything, it’s “the dinosaur movie,” and if another actor had been cast in the lead role, the blockbuster would have just as easily crushed the competition.
Part of the shift is that stars don’t have the mystique they once did when our access to them was more limited. If we wanted to get our Eddie Murphy fix, we had to see his new movie, watch an old one on VHS or maybe luck out with cable.
But our relationship to celebrities has changed. We have more ways than ever to see stars — and not just because the paparazzi are supplying us with images of Robert Downey Jr. buying groceries.
Big-time actors still appear in movies, but now the ads for those movies bombard us on multiple fronts. And in case we aren’t getting enough of our favourite actor’s mug, we could find his or her complete filmography streaming somewhere.
Universal Pictures seems to be killing the competition during its best year ever (and without a single superhero movie). This is the studio that brought us Straight Outta Compton and Fifty Shades of Grey, neither of which had household-name casts, plus Jurassic World. These movies didn’t star the highest-profile actors, nor did they cater to the audiences that studios have so insistently aimed for — young white men.
In recent months, the gender pay gap has dominated the conversation in Hollywood. Actresses need to be paid more, the thinking goes, so they’re making the same salary as their male counterparts. But maybe people are coming up with the wrong solution to the problem.
Men and women should be making the same amount for the same work, of course. But what if they’re all being paid too much? Why should a studio spend tens of millions of dollars employing an actor who can’t ensure a big box office?
That’s simple: It shouldn’t.