For the most part, movie stardom is fleeting. Guess who the number-one box office attraction was in the United States from 1962 through 1965. I’ll wait. You’ll never get it. It was Doris Day. A few years later she was starring on a failed sitcom. The top box office attraction of 1958? Glenn Ford. Glenn Ford? In his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman recounts an acid comment made to him in the mid-1960s by one of Paul Newman’s agents when he was being difficult: “Someday Paul will be Glenn Ford, but right now they’ll wait for him.” The agent was wrong. Newman never dimmed. But he was the exception rather than the rule. Ford is the rule. People who rise to the top in the movie business mostly fall from the heights, even after they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
But why? What separated Paul Newman from Glenn Ford? You might think Ford couldn’t hold a candle to Newman, but Newman’s glitter didn’t just come from his eyes. He made better movies. He was in clunkers but he was also in classics—enough of them that one doesn’t associate his name with garbage like Quintet or When Time Ran Out. . . . For whatever reason—his own good taste or the wisdom of his handlers—Newman followed in the footsteps of Jimmy Stewart, who was both wonderful himself and made more good movies than any actor in Hollywood history.
Stars fade when the clunkers seem to define them more than the classics. This is true especially of what you might call “populist stars”—the ones who have made it by seeming to be the kind of guy you’d want to be your buddy and get into bar fights with. That is a powerful bond, but it can be broken quite easily. Burt Reynolds’s redneck romps delighted audiences in the mid-1970s, and the movies that made him a huge star were unexpectedly fresh and fleet, like Smokey and the Bandit. But by the early 1980s he had worn out his welcome; his car flicks became privately staged jokes for Burt and his friends. And his efforts to expand to A-list fare didn’t go very well. That was it for him.
Sylvester Stallone wrote himself an Oscar-winning movie in Rocky, but by the time Rocky IV rolled around he had become a steroided joke. Arnold Schwarzenegger had an amazing run—as a hero and a villain and a comedian—until his Last Action Hero seemed almost an attack on his own audiences and poisoned the well of goodwill he had built up.
The performer most like these men today is Dwayne Johnson, and not only because he has an absurdly fit and trained body that at times makes him seem more like a flesh sculpture than a living, breathing person. He combines a superhuman physical authority with a personality both dynamic and charming. There’s probably someone somewhere who doesn’t like The Rock, but either he’s keeping his head low or he lives in Greenland, because no one has met him. There has even been talk—which Johnson has not discouraged—of his desire to parlay his fame into a political career.
But The Rock has never quite made it to the summit of American pop culture, and the reason is simple: Dwayne Johnson makes not-very-good movies. Unlike Newman and his team, Johnson doesn’t have good taste when it comes to the projects he chooses. San Andreas, his earthquake disaster film, was mildly entertaining but pretty lame. So was his 2016 effort at a Schwarzeneggerian buddy comedy, Central Intelligence—as opposed to his version of Baywatch, which was an utter horror. These are movies audiences might have enjoyed a little in the moment, but I don’t think they generated enthusiasm for what he might have coming down the pike. He joined the Fast and Furious franchise with the fourth film in the series, and those are enormously successful, but it’s hard to credit him for their success.
Last Christmas, Johnson finally broke the mold. His action comedy Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle proved to be original, funny, touching, and altogether terrific—and it was a gigantic hit, grossing $400 million in the United States alone. It could have been his springboard into Schwarzenegger territory. But his inability to choose good projects reared its ugly head yet again. A few months later he was toplining Rampage, the adaptation of an early video game in which Johnson found himself dealing with a gigantic, albino, mind-controlled evolving gorilla. (Yes, you read that right.) It was bad and performed in mediocre fashion. And Johnson has just released Skyscraper, in which he has a prosthetic leg but can still jump into a burning building at its 130th floor. (Yes, you read that right.) In its opening weekend, it made an anemic $25 million at the domestic box office.
Dwayne Johnson is wasting the goodwill he has earned and is on the verge of becoming Glenn Ford. I’m not sure he has it in him to be Paul Newman instead, but he could certainly be the best possible version of himself.
