What Ever Happened to the Movie Star?
by Kate O’Flanagan (Deputy Features Editor)
The history of Hollywood is the history of its stars. The star system was built into the bedrock of Hollywood from the 1920s. Movie studios contracted promising young actors for defined lengths of time, trained them to sing and dance, and constructed personas around them that they were to carry into their screen work and publicity. The star system had disappeared by the ‘70s, paving the way for a new generation of stars, ones no longer locked-into a single studio. The ‘80s and ‘90s saw the trend of the bankable star continue, launching the careers of many now iconic actors – Julia Roberts, Will Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio, to name a few. These movie stars earned the moniker through their box office draw. They were the reasons people came to the movies.
Throughout the 2000s, and into the 2020s, we have seen fewer and fewer megastars emerge from the throng. The art of acting has not changed. A-listers still exist, their names just don’t have the pull they once had. The business itself is what has changed – but how?
The 21st century has seen a consistent decline in cinema ticket sales. Peaking at 1.58 billion tickets in 2002, by 2019 box office sales had dropped by 22%. This only worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic. The revolving door of already known intellectual property – Marvel, DC, Star Wars – dominating the cinema listings can be attributed to this decline. Film studios responded by reducing their yearly output and banking on proven commodities. The notion of ‘star power’ equalling financial success was dead in the water. This ‘go big or go home’ mentality embraced by the major studies also led to the decline of the mid-budget movie.
Think Jim Carrey in The Truman Show (1998), Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich (2000), Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (1989); these mid-budget films were often vehicles for actors to display their range and play against type. They could also be relied on to make a profit upon release. If not solely in the theatre, then also via home-video release. Now that streaming has effectively killed off the DVD market, these mid-budget films are often poorly marketed, or moved to streaming to get lost in the shuffle as soon as possible. Even Knives Out, a major mid-budget hit with ex-007 Daniel Craig at the helm, couldn't keep its sequel in theatres for longer than a week before it was on the Netflix homepage.
Streaming disrupted the market, without a doubt. But, beyond that, a greater shift occurred in the cinema landscape. The prioritisation of franchises, the glut of reboots and remakes we’ve seen in recent years, coincides with the decline of the traditional movie star. This change can be accredited to the increasing monopolisation of the industry spearheaded by the Walt Disney Company. However, homogenisation was not always a Disney calling-card. They, too, used to diversify their output and bet on the appeal of established stars.
Under the Walt Disney Studios umbrella, the company used to have their distribution under a separate brand name called Buena Vista. Touchstone Pictures was a subsidiary of Buena Vista that released typically more adult-oriented films. Notable Touchstone releases include Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Pretty Woman (1990) and The Help (2011). This perceived distance from the Disney label allowed a level of cognitive dissonance with the public, allowing Disney to distribute films that did not match their family-friendly branding. However, as Disney bought up more entertainment companies, becoming more and more of a monopoly, they began to phase out the use of Buena Vista and Touchstone. Both are now defunct.
There is no longer any separation of church and state. There is just Disney. Just Disney, and its image to maintain.
This monopolisation of the entertainment industry has probably always been the end goal of the Disney brand. In the 90s, they intentionally and successfully lobbied the United States Congress to rewrite copyright law in their favour. Under the derisively nicknamed Mickey Mouse Protection Act, copyright is retained to the author’s lifetime plus 70 years. For works of a corporate authorship the act retained copyright for 95 years from the work’s original publication, or 120 years from the creation, whichever expires first. In addition, Disney intentionally acquired independent studios, with Miramax becoming the first to be acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 1993, and proceeded to choke out, or buy, fellow established studios.
With Lucasfilms, Marvel and 21st Century Fox under its control, Disney owns the lion’s share of the entertainment industry. In the last decade, only 2014 and 2020 saw the highest-grossing movie of that year come from a studio that wasn’t Disney. In 2019, seven out of the top ten were Disney movies. Disney has saturated the market with intellectual property that has steamrolled over their competition.
Under this Disney monopoly, intellectual property is the star. Not the actors.
Even actors in these Disney properties are aware of this. “There are no movie stars anymore,” said Anthony Mackie, who portrays the Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), at the 2017 London Comic Con, “Like, Anthony Mackie isn't a movie star. The Falcon is a movie star. And that's what's weird. It used to be with Tom Cruise and Will Smith and Stallone and Schwarzenegger, when you went to the movies, you went to go see the Stallone movie. You went to go see the Schwarzenegger movie. Now you go see: X-Men. So, the evolution of the superhero has meant the death of the movie star.”
Last year, Quentin Tarantino also accredited the death of the movie star to the ‘Marvel-isation of Hollywood’. “You have all these actors who have become famous playing these characters,” the Oscar-winning director said on the 2 Bears, 1 Cave podcast, “But they’re not movie stars. Right? Captain America is the star. Or Thor is the star… It’s these franchise characters that become the star.”
Individual actors have been praised for their roles in the MCU – Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Evans as Captain America, Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger – but any blank slate could have been slotted into the roles, as shown by the three actors we’ve had portraying Spiderman in the past twenty years. Not to mention the three variations of Batman in an even shorter timeframe.
The actors do not matter in this equation. As Marvel projects have increasingly abandoned practical effects in favour of CGI, separated actors in the same scene from each other and redacted entire sections of the script – “It’s kind of hard to learn your lines when you can’t see them,” Zendaya once quipped on the Jimmy Kimmel Live – from their cast, it seems the acting might not matter either.
There is, possibly, one bona fide movie star left standing, an actor who can sell a film on his name alone: Tom Cruise. Staunchly opposed to debuting on streaming, he is credited with ‘saving’ cinemas by holding back the release of Top Gun: Maverick throughout the COVID-19 pandemic until it could be released exclusively in theatres. The gamble paid off. Nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, Maverick went on to be the second-highest grossing film of 2022 and the first Cruise film to surpass $1 billion at the global box office. It’s all about the money.
While still a nostalgia-tinged, legacy sequel, if Paramount Pictures thought they could make a financially successful Top Gun (1986) follow-up without Tom Cruise, they would have done so in the intervening thirty-six years.
The age of the movie star is over.
The age of the cinematic universe is here.
