Who are the movie stars of today?

PUMP THE WELL! PUMP THE WELL!

I hate when you fancy people with digital NYTimes subscriptions post links where we can’t go.

R2, I guess they’re just trying to increase traffic to their site.

Without judging their value:

Men: Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, Chris Pratt

Women: Margot Robbie, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone

There are others but I would say those are the current and most desired.

Dicaprio but I disagree.

I agree 100% that Emma Stone is a movie star.

I think this take is mostly right. Nowadays once an actor reaches a certain level of celebrity, they get huge paychecks dangled in front of them to do stupid blockbuster comic book and scifi movies. There’s not enough reward left for doing real prestige acting.

If those types of incentives were around in earlier generations, Cary Grant would have retired at 40 after making $20mm for playing Batman; Sissy Spacek would’ve followed up Coal Miner’s Daughter with some Netflix limited series in the Star Trek cinematic universe and never work again.

Audiences demand garbage now, and garbage movies don’t create movie stars.

That article says Viola Davis is a movie star so it’s worthless.

R8, lol that's messed up. I certainly think she's A list for her age group. She might actually be bigger than Halle now, who has proven she cannot lead a film since her Oscar. Though Viola will never be a sex symbol so she will never get certain endorsements.

This is my group of contemporary movie stars excluding those that became famous in the 90s or early aughts.

Bradley Cooper, The Rock, Chris Pratt, Michael B. Jordan Chadwick Boseman(RIP), Jamie Foxx, Ryan Reynolds, Paul Rudd

Jennifer Lawrence, Viola Davis, Tiffany Haddish, Jennifer Anniston(was not a film star until the mid 2000s), Penelope Cruz, Michelle Williams

R7 very good points. Many of these "A list actors" can't become true stars because their in costume or heavy makeup in all these Marvel movies. And then there's the fact that their usually replaced after X amount of years. Roberty Downey Jr. Is one of the few that is a movie star first, Iron Man 2nd. And that's probably because he had a whole 20 yr career spanning back to the 80s. Johnny Depp was one whose screen presence and sensibilities felt like he was making the character he was playing like Jack or Chrarlie, and that no one else could play their roles. I feel like James Franco was on his way to becoming A list, in fact he was but it was short lived due to the drama surrounding his academic professorship.

By today we meant 1973 right? We can’t make these questions too hard!

Movie stars that make big money now - it’s for crap like Free Guy or The Rock Movies. Disposable films that are quickly forgotten.

Per picture, Leo can get $30M but he’s pushing 50.

I think the movie star system is over. Now it’s about a certain kind of film designed to make maximum returns. Like a cartoon or CGI film.

I think the idea of the death of the movie star has always been overblown, and I generally agree with the names R4 and R5 posted.

Stardom just works differently now, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Julia Roberts in the nineties didn't have the freedom that Emma Stone does now. Stone isn't limited to rom-coms with Ryan Gosling; she afford to take risks like The Favourite while Julia got knocked any time she strayed from what people expected from her.

Julia helped that POS Ticket to Paradise to gross $164m worldwide. I can’t stand her but she still has strong BO.

Also I think a huge component is that B list celebs are more popular than ever which has weaken the brand of A list. B and Z listers can post things on social media which will get national attention, elevating their profile. Not to mention audiences are more fragmented. The death of the big budget adult drama is also a factor. I've said this earlier in the year, The best mystery/dramatic thriller of the year was produced under the Batman brand.

True prestige acting is often on television/streaming. With the exception of GOT, Breaking Bad, Stranger Things-- these things are not broadly watched by a general audience. The measure of success has been lowered because there is so much content out there.

R12 Free Guy is actually a clever little flick. It reminded me of the big budget high concept movies of the 80s, with modern sensibilities.

Brad Pitt ain't dead yet!

Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling each got $12.5 million for Barbie.

R12 yea but Emma Stone is nowhere near as popular as Julia Roberts was in the 90s. Or even Meg Ryan or Sharon Stone. Back in the 90s people outside their demos knew who these stars were. Everything's so fragmented now.

I think with actors, especially women. aging must be hard. Unlike iconic singers and rock stars their legacy forever lives on. If anything they make more money as they age. With actors it's the reverse. Im talking about the big name hollywood actors. Julia is lucky in that she has a Canon of iconic roles.

They should do away with “movie star” and just say “content star.” Because everything is streaming.

R18: With any luck Barbie will end Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, and Greta Gerwiig all at once.

R22 from your finger tips to the movie gods ears

I am really regarding the superhero genre as the Western. It will fizzle out. People forget how long Westerns were immensely popular and how influential they were on later dramas and films. I think the Marvel era will certainly have an affect on non comic big action flicks, we see that already. But it will fizzle, I think from profits were already starting to see its decline.

Let's pray that I am right.

She's an unapologetic stuck up bitch but Roberts does still command a "movie star" presence when you see her about. Not one of the other current ladies mentioned has that rare quality. Save for maybe Jennifer Lawrence.

R18 The fact that Ryan Gosling got 12.5 is the reason Hollywood is failing. What has he done since the Notebook to warrant that. Well I guess he's sold plenty of People magazines, even with their sells declining. He has not a proven bankable star. If this movie is a hit it will because of the filmmaking, writing, and marketing not because Ryan Gosling can lead a film.

I am afraid it’s going to get worse. Virtual reality games, etc. if it wasn’t for HBO Max, there would be very little quality content.

Julia Roberts walks around like a fkin star because she knows she is one. She consistently didn't have flops for years. She's the Beyonce Knowles Carter of Hollywood.

Ticket to Paradise is Julia’s first hit in 10 years.

Wonder made something like 300 million worldwide. Not a star vehicle but doubt it hurt much for the frau moms who took their kids that she was in it. Despite that I think the poster was referring to late 90's to early 2000s when she was reeling out 100 million dollar hits one after another.

You mean 20 years ago.

But, but … Timothee and Zendaya will save Hollywood!!’

Daniel Craig.

[quote]Obviously, two of the year’s biggest movies are just the second installments of franchises that could go on long after we’re gone. One of them is actually calling itself “Wakanda Forever.” But I’m watching us devour both it and “Top Gun: Maverick” and see a referendum on a more pressing matter: stars and the movies’ disuse for them.

THIS gets published in the Times? This is a blog post! This is someone's Twitter thread! It's not publication worthy, let alone ready for the New York Times. Fucking ridiculous.

R32: Doesn't look like it.

Here's the NYT piece (Part 1)...

We’re Out of Movie Stars. Whose Fault Is That?

There are fewer films now that allow an actor to grow a persona and a Tom Cruise level of stardom. It’s a crisis, and the movies know it.

December 1, 2022 By Wesley Morris

Obviously, two of the year’s biggest movies are just the second installments of franchises that could go on long after we’re gone. One of them is actually calling itself “Wakanda Forever.” But I’m watching us devour both it and “Top Gun: Maverick” and see a referendum on a more pressing matter: stars and the movies’ disuse for them.

Heading into “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” the stress and suspense, at least as far as I could tell, had everything to do with the absence of the first movie’s star. It made one of Chadwick Boseman. The second lured us in to inspect the void his stardom left. It memorializes, eulogizes, celebrates him — the Marvel logo that flickers by near the start of these movies as montages of its roster (Thor, Iron Man, Hulk and everybody else) has become a light show devoted to Boseman. Then the movie goes on for more than another two and a half hours, plenty of time not simply to mourn this man but to miss him. There’s more to recommend about it than a vacancy. Nonetheless, inquiring minds — millions of them — wanted to know: Who’d dare try and fill that costume?

“Maverick” is the opposite: a void clogged with light. When Tom Cruise returns, triumphant, to a packed warship at the end, he’s greeted with the kind of ecstatic cheering you tend to see when your team wins a championship after a 100-year drought or extras get liberated in one of those imperialist Hollywood blockbusters. Except … they’re military professionals! But that kind of ridiculous passion must be ours. This is the planet’s highest-grossing movie of 2022 by many miles. The original was a hit in 1986 but not as commandingly as this. And Cruise has never appeared to mean as much to us as he does now. Some of that excitement seems like a problem of scarcity. And maybe “Maverick” made us nostalgic for more abundant times.

There are fewer movies, and even fewer of the kind that once allowed an actor to develop a persona over time, to turn into a Tom Cruise: movies about people in jams, in danger, in panic, in pursuit, in heaven, in heat, in Eastwick and Encino and Harlem and Miami, in badlands, lowlands, heartlands, wastelands. Blockbusters, bombs and sleepers. They were relatively inexpensive — middlebrow was one name for them — and they told stories about original characters, not mutations of intellectual property (not always, anyway). And many of the people in them were what we call stars. Folks who were all a little more something than the rest of us — grittier, wittier, prettier, sillier, fitter, wilder, braver, funnier, franker, tougher, loonier, louder.

I mean, we’ve still got stars. And we’re clinging to them. We came out to see Viola Davis as an African queen in “The Woman King,” which spent a week at the top of the box office. I, at least, went for the sensation of catching her in bad-mama-jama warrior mode, and she overdelivers.

The stars are clinging, too. This should be a story about how good Miles Teller is in “Maverick.” But I can’t write that. Because Cruise is better — better in “Maverick,” better at being Tom Cruise than Miles Teller is at being Miles Teller. This isn’t Teller’s fault. Even though the mustache he wears looks as if it’s being sucked into his nostrils, he’s obviously got something. Take the scene where he does some courageous improvisation while airborne and winds up crashed behind enemy lines. When Cruise tracks him down and asks what he was thinking, Teller gives him just the right amount of bewildered exasperation to crack the theater up. “You told me not to think!” he says. I laughed until I frowned: There’s, like, 15 minutes left. Where’s this guy been the last two hours? Where everybody else is in “Maverick”: beside the point — the exclamation point that is Tom Cruise.

(Part 2)

I get why this movie was greeted with all kinds of national relief when it opened on Memorial Day weekend. It’s the only thing all year that a plurality of my friends had gone to a theater to see, and had gone back to for second and third helpings. For one thing, anytime the movie’s in the sky, it’s a real kick — it’s sexy the way those jets all but make out with one another. But the real draw is Cruise, who hovers near the peak of his Cruiseness: vulnerable and impervious, sly and earnest, charmingly obnoxious‌‌, obnoxiously charming.

He turned 60 in July, yet he’s retained the toothy gleam of a freshly sashed Eagle Scout. And though that face betrays no reasonable concept of time, the years have accrued in our sense of his value. “Maverick” is the culmination of a four-decade investment we’ve made in him. Whatever “Tom Cruise” means, it took a string of movies to educate, seduce and string us out, for us to understand that all the grinning and intensity and motion would amount to a persona that can withstand any humiliation (synchronized bartending, firing by protégé, masked orgies, “The Mummy”) because the movies themselves are rigged for his triumph. Triumph is stardom’s luxury.

The piles of money that rolled in for “Maverick” led some in the press to conclude that, after the film industry’s pandemic-induced collapse, the movies were back and, rightly, that the reason was Cruise. But we’re gathering to witness the end of stardom, not its resurrection. Cruise remains a star. But who else in “Top Gun: Maverick” is? The movie itself is about Cruise’s lastness, his otherworldliness. Its best scene comes early, after Cruise has flown a military jet past its breaking point and plunged from just near outer space. Disheveled and engulfed in his parachute, he staggers into a greasy spoon in what may as well be Mayberry and asks the stunned diners, “Where am I?” And an innocent little Opie looks up from his plate and says, with precision timing, “Earth.” Cruise’s stardom isn’t even familiar to Middle America anymore. It’s alien.

The plot seeks our pity. His hotshot fighter pilot from 1986 is now a has-been conscripted into teaching younger hotshots the moves for the ludicrous military assignment that caps the movie. One of them is Teller. But it doesn’t matter. Cruise concludes that he’s the fairest of them all. The kids will just have to gather ’round for story time. Once he’s up there, though, hogging the ball, all I could say was: makes sense. Nobody takes over a movie the way he does. “Maverick” works as a metaphor for that, too. It knows what we came for, and it’s not Miles Teller.

This, again, isn’t Teller’s fault. It’s the movies’. There are few of the kind of films that would allow him to build a persona that we’d all be clamoring for in 36 years. Billy Eichner tried to write himself into a romantic comedy, a genre as essential to American movies as milk is to cheese but a genre the studios have resisted for most of this century, as a sort of onset lactose intolerance. He called it “Bros” and got himself cast as one of the leads, a daffy podcaster who falls for a sporty suit (Luke Macfarlane). And when it sank at the box office, people blamed homophobia.

Exactly!, I almost said. Then I remembered something. I’m not straight, and I didn’t see it. Neither did most of the not-straight people in my life. My guess for this movie’s poor showing would start with some of the posters and billboards. They confused me. Two adjacent backsides, in jeans, the hand of one man covering the rear pocket of the other. Whose asses are these?

(Part 3)

One was implied to be Eichner’s. Strange that more of the posters wouldn’t simply share that. But omission like that is its own anxious disclosure: Who the hell is Billy Eichner? I mean, I know. He’s the comedian who’s given us “Billy on the Street,” a minutes-long antidepressant in which Eichner’s a runaway stallion dragging along some famous person and interrupting the promenades of regular New Yorkers. You watch it and think, “Antic comedy? Yes. Ro-mantic comedy? I don’t know. Let’s see.”

The movie itself is about how antic-versus-romantic he is. But most of the ads I encountered weren’t selling Eichner at all. They were selling a milestone (the first closet-free gay romantic comedy from a major studio) — but one made by people whose previous movies peal with gay paranoia. Eichner isn’t positioned as the star of this thing. His gay identity is. So of course if the movie fails, it feels like a political crisis.

But the real crisis is something else, and it’s right there in those anonymous butts: We’ve run out of movie stars! And the lackluster showing of “Bros” — in theaters, anyway — makes me think Eichner won’t get many more chances to become one.

I saw a “Bros” subway ad mounted on a duplex billboard alongside a poster for Julia Roberts and George Clooney in “Ticket to Paradise,” a straight, strait-laced, straitjacketed romantic comedy that banks on about 50 combined years of stardom but has no idea what to do with it besides brag. But Roberts and Clooney took their chemistry to the media. They seemed enthusiastic, if not about the movie then certainly about each other. And even though that poster told on them (they’re looking past each other and whoever the Balinese is carting them around this paradise; “White Lotus” vibes), it also tells you exactly what you need to know about this thing. It’s got two veterans whose stardom is a story that evidently still sells itself. The movie’s a hit.

The success of something like “The Woman King” makes sense, too. A lot of us left the house to see Davis slay. And, based solely on the charisma and sheer kinetic force of the women alongside her — Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim, Adrienne Warren — we got much more than that. It’s a vehicle for Davis to strengthen her bond with us, with art rather than social media; here’s another enhancement of her persona’s approach to leadership. I didn’t think I could like her more before I got to the theater, and yet there I was, my awe redoubled. It’s an original-enough popcorn movie — starring women no less, Black women — and man, does that feel rare.

A fertile land mass of American moviemaking has gone arid — has been allowed to go arid — in order to plumb the depths of so-called intellectual property. We still get whiffs of the old stuff. Denzel Washington keeps finding variations on long-fuse/short-fuse magnetism — adding misanthropes and the maladroit to his menagerie. He’s also 67. Since 1989, he’s starred in a movie — often two — almost annually. And most of those movies were hits. Forty chapters in the story of a persona. Those are, more or less, Cruise’s stats, too. Hollywood doesn’t release nearly as many movies now; careers seem shorter or at least more diffuse, the films they comprise less robust in their thematic diversity. So no actor currently under 40 is poised to get anywhere near those numbers.

(Part 4)

What, really, would we lose without that kind of longevity, without meaningful movie stardom? A mirror? A beacon? A road map? A portal? This isn’t a matter of discovering who we want to be but letting the movies show us who we think we are. Stars haven’t always had to pour themselves into playing superheroes. They’ve used that power to play us — people. Now, there could be a kind of justice in that power reaching its terminus. Good riddance to a system that imported the worst of this country’s prejudices and principles into its dream factory. Rampaging capitalism. Improbable whitenesses, indefensible Blacknesses. Few Asian or Mexican or Arab or Native American characters anyone had ever met, because, for starters, the actors playing those parts were often white. Our prolonged exposure let stars embed their glamour, their style and their managed perfection within our psyches, to forge the sort of warped identification that invites, say, a curious Black boy in Philadelphia to fancy himself an insufferable Southern belle on a wrecked Georgia plantation.

Which is to say that I can know all of this and still believe that half a century of Clint Eastwood movies (dozens of them) is as good an explanation of the United States as any piece of public policy. He’s his own legislation. Of course, a young me watching him in “Sudden Impact” or “Pink Cadillac” or “A Perfect World” wouldn’t have known any of that. I would just have found the mere quarry of him absurdly watchable. And if what we’re also talking about is an energy of absurd watchability, maybe it migrates across time, from the silent era to the classical system of the 1930s and ’40s, to the ruination of the ’70s and the indulgent ’80s and reactionary, revisionist ’90s. Right now, it flourishes somewhere else entirely. On TikTok, a galaxy of starlings. Social media stardom runs on evanescence. You need attention for movie stardom. And we might have run out of patience for that.

Bad timing, I’d say, since, for more than a decade, we’ve been drowning in actors who could reward that attention, actors who, over the course of a hearty career, could also serve as good an explanation of this place as Eastwood. Consider this drought in a moment that has never felt richer with hands in want of batons: Teller, Alden Ehrenreich, Simu Liu, Issa Rae, Finn Wittrock, Hong Chau, Dane DeHaan, Zoë Kravitz, Raúl Castillo, Jay Ellis, Kumail Nanjiani, Tye Sheridan, Dave Bautista, Regé-Jean Page, Alia Shawkat, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Max Minghella, Rachel Zegler, Jake Lacy, Daisy Ridley, Kelvin Harrison Jr., O’Shea Jackson Jr., Tiffany Haddish, Quvenzhané Wallis, Marsai Martin, Jeremy Pope, John Boyega, Ariana DeBose, Teyonah Parris, Nicholas Hoult, Gina Rodriguez, Christopher Abbott, Jonathan Groff. The movies aren’t set up to keep them stars in 30 years. For more than one of these names, the movie-star ship has sailed.

This really does amount to a crisis. And the movies know it. In “Maverick,” the comedy is that no one’s as qualified as Cruise. For a couple of weeks in August, our No. 1 movie was “Bullet Train,” an intermittently funny, mostly tedious crime-thriller that requires Brad Pitt to fight younger prospects — Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Zazie Beetz and Bad Bunny — ‌and casually kill most of them. They want what he’s got: a briefcase full of money, but his stature, too. Pitt’s low-stress, impervious-to-everything style needed 30 years and almost that many movies for him to achieve an ease with himself that can harmonize wisdom and vacancy. All the hand-to-hand combat stands in for Pitt’s self-preservation.

(Part 5)

A star knows how to have a good time with a movie this disposable, by making the work seem like a vacation. Disposable movies are a star’s business. They help cement their status between tours de force (sometimes the tour de force is in something disposable). But they tend to hold up, anyway, because they’ve captured some thrilling, attractive, aspirational aspect of the person at its center. Without any middlebrow, non-superhero films — star vehicles, they were called — we’re facing the elimination of being as an art form, the death of tropes, tics and signatures; laughs and struts and accents and turns of phrase; a gallery of light bulbs going “ding” over some actor’s head.

Pitt spends half of “Bullet Train” on the phone with a mostly unseen Sandra Bullock, who plays his boss, and being ogled by Channing Tatum, a passenger. There’s a clubby, cliquey bond among them that dulls the rest of the movie. Who cares about the train? You’d rather watch a comedy about whatever it is Tatum wants to do with Pitt and everything Pitt needs to hash out with Bullock. This is a reconfiguration of what they tried earlier this year with “The Lost City,” a throwback adventure comedy (and a hit) meant to evoke those Michael Douglas-Kathleen Turner capers from the ’80s. In a sense, “Bullet Train” is exactly what I should want: a star breezing through a plot. But it made me sad. It’s not interested in new stars. Everybody’s disposable but Pitt.

But he, Bullock and Tatum (one of the last actors to experience a version of conventional movie stardom) are striving to hold on to an industrial tradition in which all kinds of star-driven movies were part of the American moviegoer’s diet. The three of them don’t make many sequels and remain unaligned with any superhero roster. This possibly makes them holdouts and certainly something like conservationists.

That care feels strategic and arguably artisanal now, and it’s evident among their peers. In a burst of pandemic-bound passion, for instance, Ethan Hawke made himself a student of the lives and careers of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The result is a more than six-hour documentary, for HBO Max, loaded with interviews and clips and illuminating, sometimes dazzling insights on persona, performance and fame — on stardom.

Hawke’s ostensible preoccupation is the endurance of a 50-year marriage. He came into a trove of old interview transcripts for a Newman biography: conversations with actors and filmmakers and writers that he uses as narration read by his famous actor friends. George Clooney does Newman, Laura Linney does Woodward.

It’s a poignant sight, watching, say, Sam Rockwell and Zoe Kazan, stuck in their homes, talking about work rather than working, thinking about the intangible particularities of stardom, wondering about the personal toll art can take and the baggage an actor carries to make it.

Sandra Bullock had some hits while Julia Roberts was in a career slump

(Part 6)

Hawke has always struck me as too promiscuously imaginative to spend 30 years doing variations on a theme, the way pure movie stars do. But he’s become a sideways star, anyway — spontaneous, boyishly itchy. He was one of a paltry number of actors who had a hit summer movie that wasn’t part of a series or a universe of other titles, as the boogeyman in “The Black Phone.” We’re at the end of something and he knows it. His documentary? It’s called “The Last Movie Stars.”

We’ve entered a strange moment in which major stars’ most captivating, notable, notorious appearances have been in everything but the movies. On the witness stand for Johnny Depp; in an NBC mini-series for Renée Zellweger; for 20 chilling minutes at a White House news conference for Matthew McConaughey; at the Academy Awards for Will Smith — and not even for winning the best actor Oscar.

Then there’s the case of Brie Larson, who more or less went from Oscar winner in 2016 (for “Room”) to exuberant franchise linchpin Captain Marvel. She’s only 33, and I don’t know when I’ll see her play a regular human again. But for a while, anytime I was watching some TV sports event, I could count on seeing her try to sell me a Nissan. Before she won that Oscar, Larson had appeared in a score of movie and TV roles. What kind of star could she be with presumably more access to choicer roles? Well, we’ll never know because where are all the choice roles for her and the half dozen actresses she’d be competing against to play them?

What we’re looking at is a kind of industrial waste. Fewer movies with smaller budgets and lower stakes. Fewer contemporary equivalents to Mike Nichols or Stephen Frears or Woody Allen or Lawrence Kasdan or Martha Coolidge or Fred Schepisi or Nora Ephron or Lasse Hallström or Sydney Pollack or Elaine May or Barry Levinson or Rob Reiner or Ron Howard or Norman Jewison or Nancy Meyers — directors who couldn’t make movies without stars, who didn’t seem to want to make movies without them.

Now we’re looking at a glut of talent with nowhere terribly creative to go. There are the premium cable networks and streaming services. Television is now the land of middlebrow moviemaking. And the likes of Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon and Kate Winslet have done some of their most daring work there. They’re shrewd. Tom Cruise hasn’t gone near a “True Detective” or “American Crime Story” or “Mare of Easttown” or “Yellowstone.” What does that make him? Naïve? Stubborn? Resolute? Right?

(Part 7)

One thing to love about him is that he loves being “Tom Cruise.” He enjoys showing us his work — the clenching, the air-punching, the running, the running, the running. Basically, he lives for that maximal state of personality engorgement otherwise known as … him.

Cruise seems to know his specialty is on the endangered species list, that the real stars now are intellectual property — remakes and reboots and cinematic installment plans. Thor, not Chris Hemsworth. Spider-Man as opposed to Tom Holland or Andrew Garfield or Tobey Maguire. All those Batmen. It’s possible to behold the stars flying around Avengers offshoots and League of Justice slogs and get a certain astral kick. But those aren’t constellations. They’re salads.

People have left Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” hailing Austin Butler a star. How would they know? Elvis Presley is himself a hunka hunka intellectual property. I, at least, can’t disentangle an actor’s stardom from Presley’s, even though anytime Butler’s quaking onstage, something thrillingly original is happening, an idea. Otherwise, with Elvis, it’s always Halloween. Other people’s stardom is another place where stars are hiding their own. How many Oscars winners owe their win to an interpretation of some icon of politics, history or art? That’s not new. And some of that work is glorious.

What does feel new is that between the biopics and superhero films, these actors aren’t playing many memorable original characters. And that’s what we’re missing right now. The last time Cruise played a guy who wasn’t carrying the umpteenth installment of a franchise or a descendant of movies with a theme park ride was 2017, in “American Made.” And that guy is a plain-old commercial airline pilot who winds up doing flights for the C.I.A. while also moving coke for the Medellin cartel — “Top Mule,” basically.

Cruise has been savvy (cynical, arguably) about where the movies are now. “Edge of Tomorrow,” from 2014, is the freshest, most fun thing he has done in a decade, but since it didn’t make a billion dollars (that’s a real benchmark now), it also reeks of failure. If he gets another script as good as that one, does he decline it? Probably. The business is too risky. The people want more “Mission: Impossible,” more “Maverick.”

Austin Butler, dressed as Elvis Presley in black with a red tie, his hair slicked back in a pompadour, sings into a microphone as the hands of fans reach out to him. Austin Butler portrays Elvis Presley in the biopic “Elvis,” directed by Baz Luhrmann.

In 1986, there was more than “Top Gun” to Cruise. Five months later, he was back, in “The Color of Money.” It wasn’t really Cruise’s film. It was Paul Newman’s, itself a sequel to his pool hall melodrama, “The Hustler,” 25 years later. Here, the washed up maverick is Newman, educating Cruise in comportment, honing his skill at the pool table and showing him how to exploit all of that talent.

Newman was 61, which is nothing like Cruise’s extraterrestrial 60. He’s gray, with wrinkles and some creaks. There’s history in those creases: reserves of sadness, loss, disappointment, shame, hurt, loneliness, eased along by cigarettes and booze. For a veteran star, these are virtues. Currency. And the movie compels you to appreciate the accrual of time — the decades he’s lived, the decades we’ve lived alongside a version of him. How much had he changed? How much had we?

(Part 8)

“The Color of Money” is the opposite of that first “Top Gun.” It’s a showcase in allure instead of machismo. It’s also a Martin Scorsese movie (that Richard Price wrote), so the camera Tarzans here and there. But Scorsese knows what he’s got in Newman: meaning. His greatest trick is the amount of time Newman’s face spends behind a pair of shades. Those glittering blue eyes of his seem incongruous with the shabbiness and blight of the movie’s high-risk, low-rent pool hall scene. So Scorsese treats them like two jewels in a vault. And we get to remember what the rest of Newman can do, with stillness and pauses, exasperation, rue and delight.

It’s not as if Scorsese doesn’t know what he’s got in Cruise: bombs bursting in air. Whenever it can, the movie watches Newman watching Cruise, taking him in, absorbing his vulgarity, his volume, his volatility. “Child care,” he growls. But he senses the inevitable, too. “You’re gonna be one of the greats, kiddo,” he tells Cruise, clutching a predictive wad of $100 bills. If you happened to see “Top Gun” in the summer and this in the fall, it’s probable you felt the same.

You would have been watching two different kinds of stars (gravitas and anti-gravity) at opposite stages of their careers. Maybe you would have appreciated how, even though Newman was far from done with the movies, he was passing a baton to another generation of star. Hollywood can’t afford that performance of generosity now. Sorry, Miles Teller. All new bets are off, and Cruise must know it. He spends “Maverick” passing the baton to himself.

Thanks, OP. It's evident from this piece that Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts ARE the last two great film stars. Yes, there are others that have done well for themselves through their reign but as far as a star's movie drawing audiences to the box office just for the star they are the last of a dead, not dying breed. The age of movie stars is dead. I don't see it coming back.

R45 once again wrong. Tom Hanks, Leo, Sandra Bullock, Denzel, Chris Pratt, Michael B. Jordan have all put butts in seats in the last decade.

Blah, blah, blah. What a waste of print.

Chris Pratt, MBJ? bitch please. A head of lettuce can play their roles in comic strips and established brand movies they've done and make money. Nobody goes to the movies to see those two on name alone.

Hasn't Tiffany Haddish been cancelled because of child abuse?

Mia Goth, Anya Taylor-Joy, Florence Pugh, Jenna Ortega

Was this an article or someone’s thesis?

Computer-animated ones.

Isn't it interesting that despite the origins of Julia Roberts' marriage to Danny Moder, suburban housewife types still love her?

R53 Maybe because she'll always be the hooker with a heart of gold in Pretty Woman.

Her most famous role was a WHORE!!!

R55, they are called sex workers. Why would you be so offensive. Some have no class.

It's like Errol Flynn will always be Robin Hood, even after he was dragged into court on statutory rape charges. Nothing sticks to you when you embody a character like that on the big screen.

Sports players are the new movie stars.

Age of Pisces (glamour, Hollywood, celluloid, Art) is over, Age of Aries (sport, war, activity, physicality) is upon us.

The last great living female movie star is Miss Faye Dunaway. And don't you forget it.

Julia Roberts can eat shit with that oddly distorted mouth of hers.

Faye is classy, could still pass for twenty years younger, and has worked with legends of the cinema. She has a string of iconic movies and performances that have stood the test of time for decades.

It's the publics loss that they've tossed her away these last two decades. And all the brilliant work we've missed out on.s

Shit, the woman worked with Brando!!!!

Sure Faye (R59).

For such a principled acting country it was quite interesting that the story of street hooker with a heart of gold could become such a cultural phenomenon. And both men and women alike were so embracing a character like that. Maybe the Pygmalion thing isn't so far off but the actual Pygmalion story with someone falling for own their creation. Which i don't know how much a sculpture and an actual person is more mysogyonistic than an actual woman.

Social media was the death knell - no one really wants to KNOW about stars. People who are really good at social media like Ryan Reynolds are completely fake and curated. We don’t want to hear Constance Wu complaining that her show was renewed or Jennifer Lawrence trying to be relatable by wiping her ass on sacred monuments and bragging about existing on pizza while weighing a buck 20.

Julia and Tom are similar. Big stars but one note. No classic films.

That article lost me when they said Viola Davis.

The franchises are the movie stars today, unfortunately. Those are what draw people to the cinema and pump up box office, and the studios know it which is why nobody is commanding those Julia Roberts $30m salaries any more. I was shocked at how little Chadwick Boseman made for the first Black Panther, leading a movie that they KNEW would gross an enormous sum (and he worked like crazy promoting it too).

They also don't make adult oriented movies for the cinema any more, it's all these infantile tentpole movies. So the 'movie star' glamour and mystique is completely dead. They are forced to do these lame press junkets talking about which co-stars they are being 'shipped' with and how obsessed with pizza they are, and what it was like working out for the movie. You won't see the likes of Cary Grant or Joan Crawford again, nor will you see something like Ingrid Bergman or William Holden discussing some in-depth political concept on the Dick Cavett show.

It works in their favour that the actors are interchangeable and nobody is a huge 'draw'. They can pay people less and sell their umpteen sequels with whoever in them. When was the last time you heard 'I can't wait to go see the new [insert actor here] movie'?

R65. How much did Chadwick make. Yet they give Ryan Gosling 12.5m for that Barbie film. Chadwick had successfully lead two bio flocks, adult dramas. Probably classic racism.

R65, it seems that individual Marvel people are still seen as a draw. RDJ in particular - I think no one would suggest that another actor could have played the Iron Man character as successfully.

It is true that beyond RDJ, Scarlett and some of the big-name cameos I don't foresee huge careers for most of them.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Boseman made $2 million for Black Panther, which was much more than what stars like Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth made for their first Marvel movies but much less than what they earned at the time of Black Panther's premiere.

I enjoyed reading that, OP. Did you write that? I really liked it.

Lol, I just realized it was Ny Times. I enjoyed it anyway!

Elliot Page

Kirk Cameron

Froy

Kate Jackson

Meghan Markle

Madonna

Simon Cowell

Sebastian Croft

Shawn Mendes

Glenn Streep

Irene Cara

Pamela Bellwood

R71 Go away you weirdo.

Death to this 'relatable' Era of celebrity. Bring back the aloof, untouchable, Marlene Dietrich type movie star. The whole point of celebrity is that they are NOT just like us despite what US weekly wants to tell you.

Oh honey, if you don't understand how Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts are the last movie stars you don't understand movie stars. They were the last of the plug in stars.

R75 oh honey it's common fkin sense if there are stars who have hit the scene after their arrival and exploded since then, they can't be the last. Leo came after them and is bigger than them both. Are you slow or just plain stupid.

It still amazes me that people trot out the 'there are no new movie stars' argument. It's essentially what Norma Desmond argued seventy-two years ago, and every time people repeat it, it has the same touch of narcissism. My generation had real stars, while no one who follows could ever possibly live up to them.

It wasn't true in 1950, and it isn't true today.