Only Old Movie Stars Matter to Moviegoers
A list of the Top 100 actors making the rounds among industry executives highlights a troubling reality for Hollywood: the supply of new movie stars is declining alongside the box office.
A new study is going around town this month that has some of the top studio executives talking. National Research Group, the analysis firm that specializes in entertainment and tech, commissioned a survey asking consumers to name up to five actors that would make them most interested in seeing a movie in a theater. Not Who are your favorite stars? or Whose movies do you most look forward to? This was, very specifically, Who do you most want to watch in a theater?
It’s the relevant question these days as studios debate the theatricality of film projects, and who to put in them in order to raise the perception of value in the theater-going experience. Zendaya is clearly a huge star, for instance, but can she open a movie in theaters? Do audiences still want to see Angelina Jolie on the big screen? Which Chris, if any Chris, actually puts butts in seats these days?
With more studios and streamers deciding to open their movies first in multiplexes, the theater owners likely will declare victory over streaming at the CinemaCon theater conference this week in Las Vegas. But the results of this survey, while not exactly surprising, reveal a pretty serious problem in the kinds of actors that audiences want to pay to see. NRG circulated the study and its Top 100 Actors list to its studio clients, one of whom quietly slipped it to me. So let’s dive in.
1. Our Movie Stars Are Getting Super Old
The big takeaway: The stars who matter to moviegoers are old, and getting older. Only one of the Top 20 actors named in the study is under 40—and Chris Hemsworth, at No. 20, will celebrate his big 4-0 in August. Here’s the full list. Remember, respondents were asked to name stars that made them most likely to go to the theater:
1 Tom Cruise
2 Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
3 Tom Hanks
4 Brad Pitt
5 Denzel Washington
6 Julia Roberts
7 Will Smith
8 Leonardo DiCaprio
9 Johnny Depp
10 Kevin Hart
11 Keanu Reeves
12 Sandra Bullock
13 Ryan Reynolds
14 Adam Sandler
15 Harrison Ford
16 George Clooney
17 Robert Downey, Jr.
18 Angelina Jolie
19 Morgan Freeman
20 Chris Hemsworth
Yeah. Reads for the most part like an Oscar party guest list from 20 years ago, right? No Zendaya. No Jennifer Lawrence. No Chalamet or Holland or Michael B. Jordan, or anyone Hollywood has anointed a movie star in the past decade. The average age of this crew is 57.5 years old. Only four of them are in their 40s. Two are in their 80s. It’s almost like when people think theaters, they think throwback, meaning they stopped recognizing actors as theatrical draws after Thor came out in 2011.
That year, of course, is about when Netflix started to become a thing. Maybe the notion of stardom has become so fractured and degraded by Peak TV and the streaming era that the analysis of theatricality, perhaps even subconsciously, is a nostalgic enterprise. If theatrical hits represent the monoculture, and the monoculture is dead, then the stars who connote theaters are necessarily the old stars.
Or maybe it’s actually conscious. Hollywood has been telling audiences for years that new stars don’t really matter because the kind of new, original movies that create stars don’t really matter. We can blame the rush to streaming, or the dependence on pre-sold I.P., or social media—all the factors that combine to reduce the star power of actors. Of the Top 20, only Hemsworth got famous in a Marvel or DC movie; everyone else became huge in an original star vehicle (Pretty Woman, Top Gun, etc.), and then kept making them for years.
Cut to this year’s theatrical schedule; not many chances for an actor to break free of the I.P. Instead, it’s Ezra Miller in The Flash, Margot Robbie in Barbie, all pre-branded plug-n-plays. Plus, of course, the old guard has hung around much longer than their predecessors. This year it’s Cruise (Mission: Impossible 7), Ford (Indiana Jones 5), Washington (Equalizer 3), Reeves (John Wick 4), and so on. Real movie stars are throwbacks because the biggest movies themselves are increasingly throwbacks.
A couple other findings of the NRG study:
Cruise, 60, ranked No. 1 among men but fell to No. 7 among women, meaning that despite the miracle of Top Gun: Maverick, he hasn’t quite erased the couch-jumping era, and the Scientology-infused separation from wife Katie Holmes and daughter Suri.
Johnson, 50, is No. 1 among teens. I’m betting that his social media skills and Moana helped get him there.
The popularity of Roberts, 55, is driven overwhelmingly by women over 35. Not coincidentally, Universal targeted these exact viewers for the recent Ticket to Paradise, with Clooney.
Remember when everyone declared Sandler’s career as a movie star over when his rich Sony deal ended and he was “forced” to sign with Netflix? Today Sandler, 56, is No. 2 among 18-24 year olds, no doubt thanks to those Netflix movies. Hart, 43, skews young as well, thanks in part to all his Netflix activity.
Washington, 68, is overwhelmingly the top choice for Black audiences, with more than 3 times the mentions as any other actor.
Johnny Depp! The 59-year-old, fired off of Fantastic Beasts 2 and considered unhireable by most studios amid his personal issues, is still a draw. And he’s especially strong among females under 35, according to the study. They apparently aren’t bothered by the court finding in the U.K. that he abused Amber Heard.
CAA FTW: For the poor agency P.R. people keeping track of this stuff, the Top 20 are repped by CAA (9), WME (7), UTA (2), and two have no agent (Leo because he can bring his posse to CAA parties without paying 10 percent; and Depp because the majors won’t touch him).
2. The Demo Breakdowns
Young people aren’t completely absent from the NRG study. A look at which stars over-index with specific age cohorts:
GEN Z
Zendaya (No. 47 total, No. 14 among Gen Z)
Tom Holland (No. 39 total, No. 10 among Gen Z)
Adam Sandler (No. 14 total, No. 5 among Gen Z)
Chris Evans (No. 22 total), No. 15 among Gen Z)
Kevin Hart (No. 10 total, No. 3 among Gen Z)
Like I said, I think Sandler and Hart are there because they have leaned so heavily into Netflix, where young people watch movies. And Zendaya and Holland seem like the industry’s best hope of young stars becoming actually meaningful to the next generation.
MILLENNIALS
Jason Statham (No. 42 total, No. 23 among Millennials)
Michael B. Jordan (No. 43 total, No. 26 among Millennials)
Liam Neeson (No. 34 total, No. 22 among Millennials)
Vin Diesel (No. 28 total, No. 19 among Millennials)
Leonardo DiCaprio (No. 8 total, No. 6 among Millennials)
GEN X
Julia Roberts (No. 6 total and among Gen X)
Keanu Reeves (No. 11 total, No. 7 among Gen X)
Viola Davis (No. 38 total, No. 22 among Gen X)
Matthew McConaughey (No. 41 total, No. 24 among Gen X)
Morgan Freeman (No. 19 total, No. 11 among Gen X)
BOOMERS
Kevin Costner (No. 32 total, No. 9 among Boomers)
Clint Eastwood (No. 46 total, No. 11 among Boomers)
Harrison Ford (No. 15 total, No. 6 among Boomers)
George Clooney (No. 16 total, No. 8 among Boomers)
Meryl Streep (No. 30 total, No. 12 among Boomers)
Those aren’t entirely surprising. The study provided some info on who over-indexes with Black audiences as well:
BLACK/AFRICAN AMERICAN
Angela Bassett (No. 50 total, No. 6 among Blacks)
Viola Davis (No. 38 total, No. 5 among Blacks)
Michael B. Jordan (No. 43 total, No. 10 among Blacks)
Samuel L. Jackson (No. 26 total, No. 7 among Blacks)
Denzel Washington (No. 5 total, No. 1 among Blacks)
3. Who Under 40 Made the Top 100
Expanding to the full Top 100 list of actors that would make audiences interested in seeing a movie at a theater, only 13 are under 40. That’s pretty brutal, given Hollywood’s historic ability to create new movie stars that power the theaters. The lucky baker’s dozen:
Chris Hemsworth (No. 20)
Jennifer Lawrence (No. 25)
Tom Holland (No. 39)
Michael B. Jordan (No. 43)
Zendaya (No. 47)
Scarlett Johansson (No. 53)
Jenna Ortega (No. 54)
Margot Robbie (No. 67)
Henry Cavill (No. 73)
Emma Watson (No. 86)
Gal Gadot (No. 91)
Timothee Chalamet (No. 94)
Jonah Hill (No. 98)
Interesting, right? Of those, only four (Ortega, 20, Holland and Zendaya, both 26, and Chalamet, 27) are under 30 years old. So 4 percent of the movie stars that matter in theaters are under 30. Pretty depressing. Did the old guard, thanks to science and resilience, just hang around so long that audiences never got familiar with new people? Or are young people just appearing in so many different projects, on so many varying platforms, that audiences don’t think of them as traditional movie stars?
Ortega, for instance, is probably high on this list because of Netflix’s Wednesday series, not the Scream movies. But it’s nice to know her audience considers her theatrical. Many other young stars are nowhere to be found here, including those Hollywood has anointed, like Florence Pugh, Dakota Johnson, Miles Teller, Ana de Armas, Pete Davidson, and many more.
Does any of this matter? I think it does. Studies like NRG’s influence casting because the studio heads read them. Jolie, for instance, has been pretty off the grid as an actor the past few years, but days after this study went around, Warner Bros. picked up a movie with her and Halle Berry. Probably a coincidence on the timing, but it’s a good piece of data for the studio. Conversely, if I’m Warners, I’m concerned by how low Chalamet is on that list, given they’ve got Wonka as a star vehicle for him later this year. Sony just shot a rom-com for theaters with Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, yet neither made the Top 100. Not great.
But if you’re Sony and you want to make a rom-com with actors under 40, this study shows the choices are pretty damn limited if you want to get people to theaters.
Source
Leo:
I think most of us here are also Millennials what affirm those lists pretty much.