Noreen Malone explores the question:
In July, The Wolverine, helmed by supposed movie star Hugh Jackman, opened to relatively underwhelming figures. 2 Guns, last weekend’s big Mark Wahlberg/Denzel Washington vehicle, underperformed too, but not as epically as The Lone Ranger’s flop in July. That movie featured another supposed movie star, Johnny Depp (Hollywood’s third-most valuable, according to Vulture), and movie-star hopeful Armie Hammer. “Tumbleweeds blew through theaters playing The Lone Ranger over the weekend, calling into question Johnny Depp’s star power,” fretted the Times. This calamity came just one week after Channing Tatum’s White House Down took in a disappointing $25.7 million its opening weekend. “[D]oes he even deserve his A-list status?,” wrote Vulture’s Kyle Buchanan. And summer movie season started with After Earth, an appallingly bad Will Smith star vehicle that failed to connect with audiences, prompting The Independent to wonder, “Is Will Smith’s reign at the summer box office over?”
Why all the performance-anxiety when it comes to male leads?
Yes, male movie stars tend to be more bankable than their female counterparts, and so it’s not great for the business as a whole if there are fewer of them. But that doesn’t entirely explain the endless, nervous parsing of what Channing Tatum’s stardom or (non-stardom) means. This isn’t solely a crisis about profits; it’s a cultural identity crisis. We go to the movies to see heroes doing heroic things, unlike the small screen, where the episodic nature of television has given way to the rise of the anti-hero. The emphasis on actors being able to singlehandedly, swaggeringly “open” or “carry” or “rescue” a movie seems like an extension of that wish. And now movie stars, like sports and political figures before them, have let us down. Or maybe not “us,” but more specifically, America’s men. Hollywood movies are made to appeal to a male audience, after all. It’s not so much that women are rejecting Hollywood’s vision of what manhood is; it’s more that American men don’t know who they want to be any more.
Update from a reader:
Wow, there are a lot of fudged facts and bad assumptions in the rather uninspired piece you posted by Noreen Malone. As someone in the film business, let me run a few things down:
1) The Wolverine opened just fine and will make a nice profit over its run. I’m not sure where she comes up with “underwhelming”, unless she was expecting it to make $100 million first weekend, which nobody out here expected it to do.
2) 2 Guns opened at #1 at the BO, made more than a third of its budget first weekend, and will end up as a minor hit. It was also made for a lower budget ($61 million) than the names in it would suggest, and marketed at that lower budget, so the success it did have was due in large part to its stars’ likability.
3) White House Down has the unfortunate distinction of being the second White-House-related terrorism movie of the summer. It was destined to fail. The fact that it even opened at $25 million is a testament to Tatum’s fan base. And, other than that one, Tatum has been gold, and he’ll have another huge hit next year with the 21 Jump Street sequel. The guy’s as legit a movie star as exists in the world today.
4) The Lone Ranger has been a well-publicized disaster for two years. Its budget was such that it has essentially no chance to make money, and they pulled a lot of advertising dollars at the end to try to cut their losses. Also, Johnny Depp has said repeatedly that he doesn’t care if his movies make money. He’s an accidental movie star on the strength of the Pirates movies and Alice in Wonderland, but other than that, he’s done quirky, indie things, many of which have failed at the BO. A huge name, but not a guy who does enough promotion or gives enough of a shit that he should be a barometer for the state of movie stardom generally.
5) After Earth was a vanity project for Will Smith that he essentially bought as a present for his son. It’s a complete anomaly and will likely not be repeated. It’s his Battlefield Earth. If he did Men in Black 4 tomorrow, it would be a huge hit.
Most importantly, what Malone says is nothing new. People have been saying that for 20 years. William Goldman wrote about it extensively in his topical books on Hollywood. No movie star has ever been able to get a huge opening for a terrible movie. Adam Sandler had 10 hits in a row … then he did Little Nicky, and nobody came. That doesn’t mean he’s no longer a movie star. It means that people don’t want to see movie stars in shit movies. Which, if you think about it, is actually a reassuring thing to know about American audiences. It’s comforting to know that quality still matters somewhat.
(Unless we’re talking about Grown Ups 2. I don’t know what to make of the fact that that POS is a hit.)
