According to the TV ads, in Hancock the titular superbeing played by Will Smith declares, “I’m the only one of my kind.” Smith might as well be speaking of the fact that he is, at this moment, perhaps the world’s sole remaining movie star. Hancock’s reviews have been, to say the least, less than stellar. Even so, the film bagged a tidy $62 million over the three day weekend, and with the help of the extended holiday frame, drew over $100 million over its first five days. Hardly a record breaker, but for a film with no presold characters, it’s pretty good. With a $150m budget, the film still has a ways to go to make money, but Smith’s international fanbase should ensure the movie at least makes some amount of bread.*
[*As a comparison, The Incredible Hulk drew close to Hancock’s first weekend box office, with $55m domestic, and was similarly budgeted at $150m. However, lacking Smith’s box office firepower, the film continues to limp its way towards the breakeven point. Short of one week, Hancock has garnered throughout the world over $180. Meanwhile, in three and a half weeks, The Incredible Hulk sits at only $210m worldwide. Hancock might soar above that figure by the end of the week, and certainly will be ahead following next weekend. And that’s a mediocre figure for a Will Smith action movie.]As to movie stars; well, obviously there are still people who star in movies. Yet in the traditional sense of the term, of someone whose presence ensures at least a monster opening, Smith might well be the only one left. Smith stars in action blockbusters, romantic comedies and small personal dramas, and his films nearly all make lots of dough. Smith’s last eight films all opened number one at the box office, and all drew at least $100 million. On the other hand, one wonders if he shouldn’t keep an eye on quality control a bit more; neither I am Legend nor Hancock garnered very good reviews, and while they were profitable, this might begin eroding his popularity in the long run.
As for the dearth of actual stars, a combination of factors is accounting for this. The biggest and most obvious is that in an era of CGI blockbusters, it’s the premise that sells the movie now, not the stars. As Iron Man demonstrated, getting the right actor is far more important than getting the biggest actor. Batman movies have been successful with numerous actors, and then they’re James Bond and Doctor Who. Notably, when Tobey Maguire started complaining about back problems while attempting to renegotiate his contract for the Spider-Man series, Columbia famously just shrugged and said they’d look for another actor, then. Maguire’s recovery was immediate. Perhaps he learned from the example of Alec “Hunt For Red October” Baldwin.
Some parts would not be so easy to recast, admittedly. For the present, Indiana Jones is Harrison Ford, Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man, and certainly it’s hard to see anyone else playing Jack Sparrow than Johnny Depp. (Who is quite possibly the world’s second place movie star to Smith at the moment, although one doubts he’ll ever have anything nearly as big as the Pirate movies again.) However, like Maguire, that means they will be able to make a LOT of money playing those exact parts, and raise their career profiles to some broader extent. However, it does not really make them ‘movie stars’ outside those roles…Depp again being the exception, mostly due to his ongoing partnership with director Tim Burton.
With blockbusters and tentpoles increasingly driving Hollywood—yes, even moreso—and with hugely paid megastars meaning less to these films’ success than ever, the floundering studios are finally figuring out that it’s better to hire a b-list cast (think Jurassic Park, starring Sam Neil, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum) and put the savings up on the screen in terms of special effects. Not only do you save millions or tens of millions before you even start shooting, but you save the gross profit participation that stars have been getting. For example, Paramount will make a nice sum distributing the latest Indiana Jones film, but it’s Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford who will personally pocket the bulk of the profits. Indeed, as it now stands, their personal combined take from the film approaches the $300m mark.
Adding to the tar pit flailing is the fact that DVD sales, the biggest source of profits over the last ten plus years, are stagnating. Blu-Ray will probably have not that much effect on this. DVD was a quantum leap forward from VHS, and it made sense for people to rebuild their film libraries with the upgraded format. Blu-Ray is…a leap. Better, but probably not enough to cause much rebuying of previously purchased movies. Indeed, reports indicate a Blu-Ray player makes regular DVDs look better to start with. An actual Blu-Ray disc is better still, but not by that much. Buffs will certainly move in that direction, but in a larger sense, most will just, in time, start buying Blu-Rays when they make a new purchase, not necessarily replace their old DVDs. So there shouldn’t be much of a long-term boost there.
What’s comical is that for all their posturing on ‘greed’ and ‘corporate evil’ onscreen and in real life, stars are starting to panic at the idea that they might soon only be making insane amounts of money as opposed to flat-out bonkers amounts of money. With the industry struggling to recover from this year’s earlier writers’ strike, one of the two actors’ unions, SAG, is warring with the other, AFTRA, because the latter leans toward accepting a new deal with the studios that SAG found inadequately more renumerative.
In other words, rather than retrenching and admitting that it’s time to scale back their expectations in times of industry straits, the SAG actors want to launch yet another industry-crippling strike. Should this occur, the most obscenely wealthiest talent, often the very ones agitating for a strike in order to preserve their place at the trough, can safely ride the downtime out. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s blue collar, below-the-line crew people are totally screwed, many of them in danger of losing their homes and other such travails.
Meanwhile, those agitating are textbook examples of loudmouthed ‘stars’ who don’t remotely deserve the huge monies they currently make, people like Sean Penn and George Clooney. Clooney in particular has an inordinate reputation as a major star, despite the fact that outside of the Ocean’s films (co-starring, it much be noted, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon), he’s had but one really blockbuster film, The Perfect Storm. And that came out eight years ago. Don’t get me wrong, Clooney is a successful mid-range actor, and will often generate smallish but decent profits in films with limited budgets. But in the modern meaning of the word, he’s in no way a ‘star.’
Well, this is going on longer than I had meant it to. (Surprise.) But I’ll return to the subject once I dig out that Variety article I’ve been saving on the panic that is ensuing from the studios finally cancelling those inane ‘production’ deals, from which talent earned millions of dollars while doing not much of anything.
