By Ross McIndoe
There is a moment in Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to tinsel town, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, when Brad Pitt nimbly climbs to the roof of a house to do some repairs. Like much of the film, the scene is bathed in the sort of golden sunlight that makes everything feel nostalgic. Before getting to work, Pitt lights a cigarette and pulls off his shirt, standing naked to the chest as the camera gazes on in quiet adoration.
It immediately became one of 2019’s most gif-able movie moments. Part of that moment’s power came from the pure, Magic Mike-esque thrill of chiseled abs under good lighting. But a major part of it came from the fact that those abs belonged to a bonafide movie star like Brad Pitt.
Almost no one has been lusted after, idolized, and dreamed about in the way Pitt has for the last thirty years. He is the walking embodiment of movie magic, charm, and sex appeal on superhuman, cinematic scale. It isn’t just simple attraction, but the explosion of associations it creates because of the monumental pop cultural status Pitt has enjoyed for so long.
Which is what Tarantino’s latest is all about, really. Nostalgia and movies’ power to tap into it: the way film can play with our memory and our sense of time, how it can preserve, alter, and evoke the past. In regards to movie stars, it seems like he’s not the only one who has been thinking a lot about this lately.
When it finally comes time to put up a tombstone for them, it will be hard to know exactly what date to put on it. New York Post declared “the Movie Star” dead in 2016, while the Hollywood Reporter puts the moment of passing somewhere on last year’s calendar. Men don’t live so long, so HuffPost was able to call time on the male movie star back in 2014. Going by Forbes, the body is long cold, having expired back in 2013, while the BBC is still in shock, having found out about their demise this year.
We’ve been yelling that the stars are falling for a decade now, and while the exact time frame might be up for debate, it’s pretty clear that the death of the movie star is upon us. Putting some of the world’s most famous actors in films simply does not guarantee that people will see them anymore.
Stars whose gravitational pull proved irresistible for decades have suddenly found their powers of attraction rapidly waning.
Johnny Depp is about as famous as a person can be, but still: even before his name became associated with domestic abuse, it could struggle to draw in a crowd — 2013’s The Lone Ranger became one of the biggest box office bombs of all time by recouping just over half of its estimated $400 million budget, while Alice: Through the Looking Glass was estimated to have lost around $70 million.
Will Smith, Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, George Clooney — all the biggest names of yesteryear have found themselves playing to half-empty theaters in recent times. Those that were supposed to inherit their crown haven’t fared much better.
Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar-winner and undisputed A-lister, made only modest returns on the likes of Red Sparrow (2018), while even combining her star power with Bradley Cooper’s was not enough to save 2014’s Serena or 2015’s Joy. Cooper’s own career is similarly littered with commercial backfires like 2015’s Burnt and Aloha.
There are a lot of factors at play in why the form of movie stardom we have known for decades is dying out. Simply put, the movie world has gradually changed into an environment that does not support the lumbering giants of past ages.
The cinematic experience has lost its place at the center of our pop culture, thanks to the rise of streaming services, while Hollywood’s modern, global-minded approach has seen IPs take precedence over actors. Robert Downey Jr. can no longer reliably sell a film (see 2009’s The Soloist or 2014’s The Judge), but Iron Man sure can.
Studios and cinemas have already begun adapting to the commercial ramifications of this change, but the question of what the death of the movie star means for filmgoers is a different thing entirely.
For fans, movie stardom is not about box office numbers. It’s about a unique sort of actor-viewer relationship that takes on an outlandish scale and can endure through the decades. It’s not entirely about about them being respected as an actor: Will Smith is one of the biggest stars on the planet but has arguably never been in a great movie, while Keanu Reeves’s acting talents have been under fire since at least Bill & Ted. In the age of YouTube stars and influencers, it’s clear that personality-led media still holds a powerful appeal, and we still have at least as many incredibly talented, charismatic movie actors as we ever have. But the shift in both how we consume media and the kind of media we consume has altered the way personality and movie stars interact.
If the signs are true, and there is not some unseen seismic change to come, we are living in the last days of the movie star era. While Tarantino’s epic was the summer’s most unabashed ode to that sort of stardom, the whole season has been filled with movies reflecting on that fact in one way or another.
When Jennifer Lopez appears half-naked on the darkened stage of a strip club in Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers, the same kind of reverence is demanded. Hustlers is all about allure: the intoxicating feeling of looking at someone not just beautiful, but overpoweringly magnetic. The devastating power of stage presence, sexuality, and charm all bound up in one body. It’s the power of 20 years of sexual tension allowed to hang in the air, masterfully exploited.
Though Keanu Reeves has similarly managed to defy the effects of time, in John Wick 3 he allows the years to make themselves known. We’ve spent decades watching him take punches, crash through windows, leap from speeding cars, and walk away without a scratch. We see the pain he carries in each step, and our minds rattle back through thirty years of hard landings and heavy blows. And each next step means so much more because of it.
While these stars have already benefited from the preserving effects of wealth, maintaining the sort of physiques that can still hush a multiplex, digital technology is also offering a way for them to roll back the years.
Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman lets three of the actors who define the gangster movie genre in the minds of their audience return to the roles that catapulted them to superstardom back in the seventies. Putting Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci in a gangster movie, told reminiscently by its protagonist years after the events, shoots directly for the nostalgia center of the audience’s movie brains, sending a high-speed montage of The Godfather, Scarface, and Goodfellas flickering across the cinema screen behind their eyes.
With Gemini Man, Will Smith uses the same sort of de-aging technology to face down a younger version of himself. Just like that, the twenty-something Smith of Fresh Prince, Men in Black, and Bad Boys is suddenly back on our screens staring down his older self. Just like that, an older, more weathered Smith is literally grappling with his unstoppable younger self.
Not all of these films are as actively nostalgic as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but they all draw much of their power from the unique relationship that audiences have had to the megastars at the center of them. No one has loomed so large or dominated the pop cultural world in the way figures like Brad Pitt and Will Smith have; no one can reliably provoke such an onslaught of associations and odd remembrances with a raised eyebrow or timely smile.
The film world has declared doomsday every time a major shift occurred — sound, color, home video, 3D. We panic about things changing, about the loss of the familiar. Perhaps especially in a time when the norms in so many other spheres appear to be rapidly shifting, we yelp at the removal of one more familiar thing. And movie stars are nothing if not familiar.
Their oversized charm welcomes us in, and we feel like we understand, if not the person themselves, their onscreen version. Long before recognizable IPs were the coin of the realm, these stars were constructing brand names that made them immediately recognizable: even before we’ve seen the movie, we know exactly what a George Clooney character will be like, what a Will Smith movie is.
For ninety minutes, we know where we are. And it’s somewhere larger than life and softer at the edges than the real world, populated by people that are cooler and more attractive than anyone we know or than anyone really could be. It’s an enjoyable place to be.
What Pitt and Lopez and Smith represent is this beautified, familiar sort of stardom. The one we’ve known for years. Rather than wailing about the fading of the light, this summer’s movies let those stars shine again. They welcomed us back into that movie star place, with films designed to draw on all those past performances, all those famous moments and memes and iconic scenes.
Rather than worrying about where we’re headed, they let us enjoy all the places we’ve already been.
