When a movie comes out, how does it get you to go see it? There are many ways that the industry as a whole– the theatres, studios, filmmakers, screenwriters, and actors get you to go out and go watch that new movie coming out on a Friday night. Everything comes down to marketing, from the way a movie is presented to big studio budgets being spent on ads, to promoting rockstar filmmakers or prolific screenwriters to having big name movie stars and their big names proudly promoted. Nowadays unlike just about a decade or two ago, IP or intellectual property rights have taken over and are a safe bet for many studios and filmmakers looking to draw out crowds—These are your superhero movies, video-game movies, sequels-prequels-and reboots, popular media adaptations, and pretty much anything that already has an audience behind it. This method of rehashing material with audiences already attached has proven to be effective and lucrative while disheartening for anyone attached to cinema. And yes, while these aren’t the only reasons to go watch a movie– especially proven by the steady but few independently done films that get traction every so often with no stars, first-time filmmakers and new material attached, these methods of garnering an audience are used frequently to the point it begs discussion. That’s why I wanted to ask a question about one of the many methods I’ve brought up, which is—What happened to movie stars?
See, what it was to be a movie star died sometime in the 2010s. Maybe it was the explosion of social media that took place, which propped up internet celebrities and took movie stars and other actual celebrities down a peg. Maybe it was a turning point in which certain audiences started feeling out of touch with certain actors being pushed as leading men or leading women. On that last point, maybe new audiences, a younger generation, filling up the theatre seats didn’t have much to connect to. A movie star– A true movie star, used to mean they were a global sensation and not only did they mesmerize global audiences but they were truly talented typically struck with a gift to magnetize audiences to a screen with the potential to make any movie a hit film. Think Tom Cruise, think Denzel, think Angelina Jolie, think Brad, think Leo… And there are many more and even if you weren’t a Denzel or Leo, you could be an Antonio Banderas or an Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Jackie Chan, you could be less of an actor’s actor and more of a people’s actor and still be considered a movie star. It came down to, are you exciting? Do people flock to your movies? Are you the next big thing right now? And if you’re name was on the marquee, it meant you can’t miss this movie.
So, enter the last decade of movies, with our media changing before our eyes, younger generations more connected to social media stars, the past younger generation growing up and having less and less time and money to go out to theatres and these new younger eyes at home after school taking up viewing hours and you have what many in the industry thought was the death of cinema. Is it to anyone’s surprise anymore that throughout the 2010s and even now still, our theatres were filled with superhero movies, video game movies, and the rest of the IP litter? Studios pivoted toward younger audiences, which in many cases meant family audiences and what really was important here was that going to go watch a movie with a movie star branded from the 90s wasn’t really a selling point to these audiences at least not as much as they used to be. The idea of a movie star was dying with even renowned filmmakers commenting on movie stars’ status. Many statuses’ flatlined, some ebbed and flowed, few if any kept high regard. Before we get any further, for anyone reading this who has forgot or who was not around at the time, I think I need to stress that being a movie star was not on the level of other celebrities like it is today. These were not internet celebrities, these were not reality TV celebrities, these were not TV-series celebrities, these were actors and actresses that could command eyes on not necessarily just a global scale but on a generational scale. It is only really now that the younger generation as a whole, culturally, is at a true disconnect with the influence of movie stars both past and what is left of the present.
Have you noticed that the last couple of years it’s almost as if a new wave of Hollywood has started to take shape just as those same young audiences grow in number and in maturity? Chalamet, Zendaya, Butler, Pugh—Oh look, half the cast of Villeneuve’s Dune cast! Look at Anya Taylor Joy, Lupita Nyong’o, Jenna Ortega, Keke Palmer. Look at Pattinson, Daniel Kaluuya, Lakeith Stanfield, Nicholos Hoult*, Zac Efron. Look at Stranger Things and their cast that gets rotated through Hollywood—Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, David Harbour, Caleb Mclaughlin, Maya Hawke and Joseph Quinn. And there are so many more I could mention. The interesting note to point out is that most of these names are all young people dominating our screens. Is it a coincidence this new Hollywood is starting to fill out with a Young Hollywood and that the biggest of these stars were child actors that young audiences grew up with? Zendaya was a Disney child actor and so was Butler; Pattinson was a “Twilight” heartthrob, and Zac Efron was Troy in High School Musical, do you remember when you couldn’t stop hearing about Zac from the tween magazines? Keke Palmer is in her own right a mega star that just hasn’t seen her full potential realized yet and she was also a child actor for Nickelodeon and Disney at one time. The point I’m trying to make is that while the influence of movie stars from a decade or two ago wane and the young actors and actresses who were promised a bright future in the 2010s fall behind—These are your white youth movie actors of the time: Miles Teller*, Dane Dehaan*, Jennifer Lawerence, Ezra Miller, Logan Lerman, Evan Peters, and Emma Roberts and the few others of this bunch. There were very few black youth actors (and practically no POC youth actors) around this time that also fit the bill but of the few there were there was Shameik Moore, Brandon T Johnson, Tessa Thompson, Trevante Rhoades— The actors that these younger audiences actually watched growing up or that they could actually relate to on screen are now the biggest faces of this New Young Hollywood. You even have Josh Peck of Nickelodeon’s “Drake and Josh” land a role in Oppenheimer. (Nicholas Hoult is a face that as a young audience member you may or may have not seen. He’s the “X-men: First Class” Young Beast as well as the “Warm Bodies” Coming-of-age Zombie. If you were a teen guy who fell into the young X-men movies or if you remember his iconic war boy performance when you went to see Mad Max with your dad or guy friends, you know who he is, maybe not by name but his face. Hoult, through a mix of particularly chosen career roles, being a brit [The British have a history of sending the cream of the crop over] and appearing next to actors and actresses in the last few years that more so fit the bill of this New Young Hollywood, I think just barely makes it so he fits into this new rising group. Miles Teller and Dane Dehaan are actually two enormous talents that you can’t help but feel missed out on something bigger. Miles landed “Top Gun: Maverick” which is his biggest movie in years and Dehaan lands minor roles in some great stuff but when you take a step back, they have little cultural impact with younger audiences which at this time separates them from this New Young Hollywood which all seem to be if not a new generation of movie stars, movie stars in the making.)
Not all of these names are attributed to super young people though. As I said, David Harbour (49), Zac Efron (37), Kaluuya (35), Hoult (35), are all listed as well and there are surely others to come. The reasoning behind lumping actors of this age group into a group I call New Young Hollywood is that I believe they represent what a New Young Hollywood’s audience is watching. David Harbour may be nearing fifty, but his Stranger Thing’s costar, Winona Ryder, does not have the same cultural presence among young people. Winona Ryder is still Winona Ryder and for younger audiences she may be only a face from Stranger Things and the more recent Beetlejuice sequel but David Harbour is not just Eleven’s dad, he’s this generations Hellboy, he’s Alexie in Black Widow, he’s Santa in Violent Night, his voice in just the last couple of years has shown up in Star Wars, Creature Commandos, and The Simpsons, and he just made a movie about E-Sports(Pretty big among young people). In so few words he’s currently relevant to young people and is very much about the now. I believe for the others I’ve named this is what allows them to be considered a part of this new group as well.
As we talk about a new generation of movie stars entering Hollywood’s limelight and we consider certain older actors having stake in this arena, I now would like to pose the question of where’s the mature movie star? The idea of a mature movie star is not an established idea as I’ll shortly make it seem but when we look through history it presents to us in the form of the classic leading man which is distinctly different from the leading men we have today. Mature movie stars go hand in hand with mature movies and as the market is flooded still with IP material and material that is made in mind for younger audiences or family audiences, movies for adults have been slow and few to come out the pipeline. This past year more mature themes and genres seem to be coming back such as movies where sex is in the forefront of plot: Challengers, Babygirl, Nosferatu. In 2022 it’s important to note Top Gun: Maverick and its success with bringing back the classic Hollywood movie feel; notice my interchanging of mature and classic but I do this to mark a difference. When talking about what makes a movie mature, it can be hard to define but I’d like to simply raise movie titles of the past which are movies of a particular type and particular set of movie stars that are simply not made anymore. Just in 2005 we got Mr. And Mrs. Smith– smart, sexy, and fun– Featuring two of the biggest movie stars at the time, and not marketed towards youth. In 1994 (An amazing year for movies) we had Clear and Present Danger, Leon the Professional, Wolf, Shawshank Redemption, Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction. In the 80s we had The Shining, Die Hard, Raiders of the Lost Ark*, Rain Man, Aliens, and more. There are too many too list and they go back to the dawn of cinema. The point is we had movies that had themes that weren’t handled with kid gloves and the movie stars at the helm of these films did not handle the audience with kid gloves. This is the main difference in emphasizing the distinction of maturity for movies and movie stars of the past and present. (Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the history of Indiana Jones being a substitute for James Bond for Spielberg and Lucas and the movie itself in which many beats of the story are not necessarily themed with young audiences in mind make this picture not necessarily an immature movie. Just read the Google description of it: “Epic tale in which an intrepid archaeologist tries to beat a band of Nazis to a unique religious relic which is central to their plans for world domination. Battling against a snake phobia and a vengeful ex-girlfriend, Indiana Jones is in constant peril, making hair’s-breadth escapes at every turn in this celebration of the innocent adventure movies of an earlier era.” And while we’re here I’ll use this to explain the vehement dislike for the new Star Wars trilogy which is that, they treated Star Wars with these kids gloves and the fact is that the Original and even the prequels have mature themes while maintaining a balance of being palatable for general audiences but not watered down to the point it becomes Disney kid mush. So, in this way, Raiders is still very much a mature movie with a mature movie star at its helm, it’s just made palatable for general audiences, something Spielberg and Lucas have mastered after having such rich careers.)
Nowadays it feels like most movies coming out of Hollywood are handled with these dreaded kid gloves. And those that are not handled with the gloves are typically hard to come by and/or they’re very depressing in nature* or they’re made outside the Hollywood system. Quickly I’ll name a few from the last few years that I think represent this claim: The Joker, The Whale, Parasite, Mother!, The Lighthouse. (I do not mean to settle on just calling these movies depressing but instead to shine light on the intention of these movies to be almost alienating for the audiences watching them. These are movies in which their entertaining qualities come from the twisted minds of their protagonists and less so from what protagonists of the past did which is awe us with entertaining feats against their antagonists. This is what I think was so refreshing about Top Gun: Maverick, the protagonist’s life was complicated but his inner life was not.) There is a wide gap right now in Hollywood’s marketplace for these mature movies and mature movie stars or as I will now switch to saying—There is an opening for classic movies and classic movie stars to come back. So now, who can take the stage and fill the void in which classic movie stars or classic leading men used to dominate?
Here’s the wager that this whole article revolves around and which seems the most logical given the signs coming off the winds of Hollywood. The truth is that Hollywood has known of this gap for years and they simply haven’t been able to capitalize on the opportunity as fast as they’d like to. There are quite a few actors’ names I could drop that many could agree seem to have in some sense filled this gap we’re seeing but before riddling off names and going into hearty explanations of why-not’s let me ask another question in an attempt to satisfy. Are they able to capture the youth audiences? What we’ve been circling this entire time is that the youth are in control. Twenty-year-olds, those who have been in this coming-of-age moment for the past decade are the ones who are going to decide who they want to see in these mature/classic roles. Okay, here’s that wager.
Enter Glen Powell. Enter Michael B Jordan. I think we’ve seen the attempts of others to be put in these movie-star positions. Of the last few years, we’ve seen these attempts crumble with the likes of Armie Hammer and Jonathan Majors with their personal matters. There are a few others but again they don’t seem to have as much capital with audiences as the studios have tried to make appear. Michael B Jordan encapsulates everything mentioned in this article of what is needed to be a movie-star but here’s what makes him really stand out. Since his explosion onto screens in 2013 with “Fruitvale Station” and “Chronicle” he has had a steady career marked with calculated role choices in which the seeds for a franchise role were planted. The roles were for Fantastic Four, Creed, and Black Panther. Fantastic Four flopped, Creed sets up a recurring franchise role, Black Panther cements him into pop culture while also showing off that he can steal scenes from heavy hitters (If you remember, Killmonger was a villain many couldn’t help but side with.) But what really sets him apart is the filmmaker, Ryan Coogler. The two have been in a mutualistic relationship since Fruitvale Station and Coogler has made Jordan his personal movie-star before this conversation could ever have been made. With “Sinners” now coming out and it being a Coogler original, with Michael B Jordan at his current bankability, and with several projects on his IMDB locked in for the soon to come, it’s hard to imagine a future in which Jordan is not taking over Hollywood’s biggest leading-man roles. Now, Glen Powell. With a face which has been everywhere in only the last few years since his love-to-hate role in Top Gun: Maverick, it can come off as a bit unfair and premature to sing the praises of such a new name dawning on Hollywood. Here again I believe the roles in which the actor has chosen is a direct link to their path to stardom. With the success of Top Gun: Maverick being monumental so much so as to have it symbolize a return or rebirth or revitalization of Hollywood, Powell’s name reached far and wide even being so that he played the heavy. Seizing the success of the film, Powell had three movies lined up within specific genres that would reach audiences all across the market while also maintaining his name in theatres for a whole two years. Devotion, a PG-13 Navy aviation movie co-starring next to Jonathan Majors at the height of Majors’ rise—This movie came out first of the three, practically being promoted alongside Top Gun Maverick, obviously chosen for the aviation theme to capitalize on audiences still not over the fever for airplanes in action. Besides this Powell also publicly expressed his fascination and support of aviation with donations and PSAs for foundations of the same interests. Besides riding off the curtails of 2022’s biggest blockbuster, the release of Hitman and Anyone But You quickly marketed himself as able to do comedy as well as able to shine by himself as a lead and co-lead. Then of course we have 2024’s Twisters in which he gives an electric performance to a reboot of a classic also strengthening his image and aligning him further with classic/mature- type movies. His approach to his roles as well as having several movies on his IMDB slated to come soon with directors like Edgar Wright, JJ Abrams, and John Lee Hancock at the helm prove it hard to not count him as some rocket-powered movie-star on the come up.
It’s to be finally said then, that movie stars didn’t die, they didn’t disappear, they just had to take a step away and reevaluate who was their audience. Taste changes and so the idea of a movie star changes as well. In this case, just ask the nearest twenty-year-old who they think is a movie-star and you might just get a glimpse of the future.