The year 2009 has been a financial disaster for nearly every industry save one: the motion-picture business. Hollywood’s box office receipts are up nearly 20 percent from 2008. The eight most successful movies over the course of the year’s first eight months have collectively grossed $2.7 billion, up from $2.3 billion for the entirety of 2008. And what is most striking about these eight films is that not a single one of them, not a single one, features an unmistakable star.
Three of them are cartoons (Up, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and Monsters vs. Aliens). Three are sequels whose top-line talents are incidental to their success (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the sixth Harry Potter, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine). Two feature relative nobodies (Star Trek and The Hangover). The first traditional star appears in the ninth-place film, which is itself a high-concept sequel in which the star mostly stands around (Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian with Ben Stiller). It’s not until tenth place that a classic vehicle hits the list, Sandra Bullock’s The Proposal. And after that you have to jump down to 15th place to find Tom Hanks in Angels and Demons.
Will Ferrell’s movie tanked. Julia Roberts laid an egg. Adam Sandler couldn’t sell a ticket. Johnny Depp disappointed. Denzel Washington and John Travolta bombed together. Instead, the movies whose successes depended on their strong leading performances were the ones featuring the 57-year-old Irishman Liam Neeson (Taken, $145 million) and the out-of-work TV comedian Kevin James (Paul Blart: Mall Cop, $146 million).
The 2009 box-office numbers offer the most dramatic evidence yet that the system around which the motion-picture business has oriented itself almost since its creation in the early years of the last century–the star system, which it largely invented–has finally reached its end. Now the pre-sold concept–Harry Potter, the latest from Pixar, a comic-book character, or a toy made two-dimensional pseudo-flesh–is the star.
The star system has gone through several stages. For the first 30 years of the business the stars were studio employees under long-term contract who were assigned to the pictures they made. They had little to do with the development of their own look, their own position in the market, or the quality of the material in which they appeared. Some, like Bette Davis and James Cagney, chafed at the control exerted on them. Others, like James Stewart and Clark Gable, were content that they did not have to manage their own careers, enjoyed the variety, and were amused at times by the peculiar feats of miscasting they were forced to suffer through.
When, in 1948, the studios lost control of the theaters they owned following a Supreme Court antitrust decision, they lost their iron grip on the assembly line. Performers began negotiating independent deals and new kinds of contracts (James Stewart was the first to win profit participation). Others, like Burt Lancaster and Frank Sinatra, actually set up production companies of their own and made wonderful pictures outside the studio system entirely.
And then, in the 1960s, the studios themselves basically collapsed and turned into large-scale versions of the small-scale production companies that had bedeviled them in the 1950s. With the loss of centralized authority and the inability to exercise control over the creative talents came a power shift. No longer did stars work for studios. Instead, studios, desperate for every conceivable scrap of advantage, fought over stars. The great added value of a star was, it was said, his ability to “open” a picture, to get filmgoers into seats on the first few days of a movie’s release. And a big star could supposedly guarantee good box-office results abroad as well.
Like many theories of how to achieve competitive advantage, this one was true only when it was true; when it wasn’t true, it was somehow conveniently forgotten. Every star has had failures and successes in roughly equal proportion. In the past 25 years the only performer to go a decade without a box-office failure was Tom Hanks. Between 1975 and 2000, the two actors whose movies grossed the largest amounts of money were–this is not a joke–Steve Guttenberg and Dan Aykroyd.
The star system has perhaps been most important not in what it has done for the pictures themselves but for ancillary, parasitical industry players–agents and managers and publicists, all of whom rake off some percentage of the huge salaries their clients are paid. And of course, there is the world of celebrity media–magazines from Vanity Fair on down to In Touch and television shows from Entertainment Tonight to TMZ, all of which depend on the constant creation of new personalities to build up, glamorize, and then destroy on the way down.
What purpose all of that serves for the moviegoer is far from clear, and indeed, the American moviegoer has made it plain that he now finds stars more distracting than involving. It is easier for him to suspend disbelief during a cartoon about a talking lion or a man carrying a house on his back held up by balloons than it is to watch Tom Cruise playing a would-be Hitler assassin or Angelina Jolie playing an assassin.
None of this is to say that the decline of the movie star is good news artistically, aesthetically, or for those whose love of the cinema is wrapped up in the wonders of performance. It is just a fact. Movie stars are fading out.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
