Brad Pitt’s new film is fizzling out. Meryl Streep is doing TV. Only Tom Cruise fills cinemas – and, in the age of superheroes and streaming, his days may be numbered. So, what does the future hold for Hollywood’s big beasts?
Photograph: Snap/Rex Features
But the connection between star and quarterly subscription rate is even more nebulous than that between star and weekly box office returns. When big movies hit HBO Max, downloads of its app spike, a recent study found. One agent confided recently that some of their more famous clients prefer the streamers’ secrecy around ratings because it avoids the bright glare of flopping at the box office.
Studio-era stars such as James Dean longed for their work to be valued artistically – as is increasingly the case with celebrity actors.Today, celebrities attuned to social media are much closer to their audiences. The internet has brought a “marked devaluation of the traditional movie star”, argued Burr, conspiring to strip movie stars of their mystique and marking what he calls “the triumph of celebrity socialism. The means of the production of stardom are at last in the hands of the people.
“Today, actors and actresses float across and around stardom,” wrote the film historian Janine Basinger in The Star Machine, her 2007 history of the star system. She identified the rise of something she called “the neo-star”: the actor who threads the needle between typecasting and character acting. The description fits Driver, Lawrence and Cumberbatch, all of whom have moved between big branded franchises and Oscar-bound film projects.
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