Did superhero movies kill the movie star?

Plus we look at Spielberg's not-so-Amazing Stories

Hey, folks. I’m having a tough time getting started this week, and part of that is because I missed the Saturday Free-For-All and it threw me off.

Didn’t mean to. It’s the first weekend since I started the newsletter that we haven’t had a Saturday post, and I apologize for that. I started the day with an appearance on the Movie Trivia Schmoedown. If you’re not familiar with that show or that entire corner of the Internet, it is by far the weirdest ongoing thing I participate in, and I enjoy that. It’s part professional wrestling, part genuine movie trivia contest. I’ve been participating for several years now, and I’ve had my ups and downs in the league, but I have grown very fond of the overall endeavor. I respect the lunatic thing that Kristian Harloff and his collaborators are building, and the boys have come to really enjoy the overall experience as well. Allen, who celebrated his 12th birthday last week, was here for his birthday weekend, and after we went to the Schmoedown, it kicked into Birthday Mode. We ended up going to the Alamo Drafthouse for dinner and a movie, and he got to take his buddy Vic with him, and the two of them lost their damn fool minds. It was a blast.

But considering the sleepover didn’t end until midday Sunday, the weekend just plain got away from me, and it’s taken a while to get revved up again. Some of those Things We Cannot Speak Of Yet occupied yesterday, and then there was a screening of The Hunt, which I’ll review tomorrow, and you see how it all snowballs? Still, this is the joy of the newsletter format. There’s a flexibility here, and I have enough good stuff today to more than make up for it.

First up, there’s a question I’ve been contemplating recently…

Did Superheroes Kill The Movie Star?

I know that sounds like a strange question considering who our current movie stars are, but it’s a real one. If I asked you to name the biggest stars in the business right now, I’m guessing almost every one of them that you’d name could also be connected to either a DC or a Marvel character. That’s the way the business works. If you want to be a movie star, you play a superhero, and even our great character actors get mixed in to give credibility to the movies.

But what does “movie star” mean now? The biggest movie star of the superhero era is Robert Downey Jr., and I’d argue that he not only kicked off the modern superhero era but also set the template that has been rigorously followed since then. Has that translated into real movie stardom, the kind that opens a movie simply because he’s in it, though? Dolittle and The Judge would argue that no, he is not that kind of movie star. Chris Pratt. Chris Hemsworth. Tom Holland. Benedict Cumberbatch. Scarlett Johansson. All talented. All charismatic. All working non-stop, no doubt about it. But are they the actual draw in any of the movies they’ve made away from Marvel or DC? If you take them out of the mega-franchise, can they sell tickets?

Hollywood, as a system, has always had trouble with the concept of stars. They love them because the public loves them, but they hate them because they cannot always control them. Alfred Hitchcock once complimented Walt Disney for figuring out the perfect movie stars, ones he could tear up if he was dissatisfied with them. As the studio system ended, movie stars suddenly had a currency that made them indispensable, and studios were forced to deal with them in different ways. Watching the generation of stars like Newman and Redford and Nicholson and Brando and Pacino, stars who were free to follow their interests, who made projects commercial simply by showing up for them, it felt like movie stars had almost unlimited power. They used the “one of me, one for them” technique to make some challenging, powerful art that has endured, and it made the ‘70s and the ‘80s and even the ‘90s an interesting era for me to observe as first an audience member and then as a writer and as a critic.

Today, the system is totally different. IP is king. The biggest movie star in the world is Kevin Feige. He is the person Marvel cannot recast, and at this point, it seems like he’s the only person who Marvel cannot recast. We’re reaching the point in the superhero cycle where it’s going to start to be generational, and either characters or studios are going to have to pass the torch. It’s interesting that we’re reaching the end of the Daniel Craig era of James Bond after No Time To Die right now, because there’s never been a climate quite like this one during the recasting of a James Bond, and when you talk about keeping a character and a franchise alive for decades, James Bond is absolutely the gold standard.

Or was, anyway, even with all of the wild ups and downs in quality in the series. Because I think it was by default. For the longest time, there was really nothing else quite like James Bond. When Ian Fleming, Harry Saltzman, Cubby Broccoli, and Kevin McClory all talked about the idea of “James Bond movies” before the production of Dr. No, they knew they envisioned an entire series of movies, and they saw them as somewhat interchangeable stories, less serialized and more about maintaining a status quo. The casting of Bond was important, of course, but they knew from the start that the property had to be bigger than the actor. They wanted to find someone who was less than a star at the beginning because they wanted the public to see Bond first. Once Connery became iconic as James Bond, the trouble began, and that entire On Her Majesty’s Secret Service/Diamonds Are Forever/Live And Let Live run of events convinced the producers that the switch could indeed work. Once they proved it… once they got to the box-office of The Spy Who Loved Me or Moonraker, movies that were huge at the time… they knew they could keep doing it for as long as the public would show up. It’s frankly amazing that they’ve pulled it off as many times as they have, but in doing so, they created a model that other producers have wrestled with ever since.

There was the agonizing slow-death horror of the way they tried to spin the Pink Panther films into a series that existed independent of Peter Sellers, but every single thing they’ve done since his death has been noxious and awful. There was the “where did Clouseau go?” movie they built out of spare parts and deleted scenes, and that was horrifying. There was the Ted Wass-is-looking-for-Clouseau film that even used Roger Moore as the “new” Clouseau, and as freakshow-weird as that is, it does not mean I would ever inflict that one on anybody. There was the Clouseau-had-a-son film with Roberto Benigni that was skin-crawlingly unfunny. And then Steve Martin took his own swing at the character in a couple of films that I like to pretend simply do not exist. But did you know they had actually explored recasting Clouseau early on, before they made the films that really cemented Sellers’ ownership of the part? Weirdly, Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers, who had sworn never to work together again, were actually working together again at the time that Inspector Clouseau was made, but on the film The Party. Instead of waiting for them to make that movie, the Mirisch Company decided to make a new Clouseau film without them, and they hired Frank Waldman (who co-wrote the rest of the series from this point forward) to work with Bud Yorkin. Alan Arkin was cast in the role, and the resulting film is truly confounding.

It would seem that Bond was the exception, not the rule. For the most part, franchise films stuck with the stars that built them. Dirty Harry was Clint Eastwood and when Clint was done, so was Harry. Indiana Jones is still, to everyone’s enormous surprise, still Harrison Ford, and after Solo, apparently, Han Solo is still Harrison Ford, too. When the big franchises did recast, it was rarely in the major roles. There are plenty of examples like Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight or Elizabeth Shue stepping in for Claudia Wells in Back to the Future II, but trying to switch out the key players is harder. It was really with Batman that the Bond model was put to the test successfully, and with Batman’s success, the floodgate apparently opened. We’re on our third Spider-Man now, and it seems like Tom Holland has successfully made the part his own now. I think we’ve adjusted to the idea of a constant rotation of Supermen and Batmen, and I’m sure Warner will successfully launch Robert Pattinson’s version of the Bat without any significant pushback.

The real question with Marvel is how they’re going to handle things in the coming decade. Now that they’ve absorbed all of the Fox/Marvel properties, they can obviously do anything they want with X-Men, and I’m curious to see what they do regarding the very real (but also genuinely diminished) love that people have for that version of the characters. Hugh Jackman is out of the Wolverine business, and that’s a good thing. After Logan, he’s not going to end up making a better movie about the character, and he’d done it for almost 20 years. That’s ownership of a character. Robert Downey Jr. is in the same position. In those roles, those guys are undeniably the biggest stars in the superhero universe. But we’re going to see them eventually recast both Wolverine and Tony Stark. Maybe not immediately. Maybe not even in the next five years. But you can be sure they’re going to keep both characters alive well past the involvement of the actors who defined the roles, and when that happens, you’re going to see the first genuine test to the Marvel model.

Sure. They recast Bruce Banner/The Hulk. Twice, if you count the Ang Lee version that they made before the MCU got going. And when the Edward Norton to Mark Ruffalo switch was going on, I was right there in the middle of it, reporting on every twist and turn. It was clear that we were seeing a defining moment for the company because Norton believed that he was the draw. He believed that people didn’t just care about the Hulk, but specifically about his version of the Hulk. Marvel was willing to bet that he was wrong, and that they could make the audience happily accept the change. At this point, Ruffalo owns that role. It would be tough for Marvel to make a switch again because of how well he settled into the part. Tough… but not impossible.

As much as those moments will define Marvel, they will also be significant because we’ll see what happens to the Marvel stars once they make the choice to move on. What will happen to Robert Downey Jr. over the next five years? Does he have another franchise in him? Does he care? He’s always been such a great character actor that maybe stepping out of the movie star box would be good for him. What about Chris Hemsworth? He’s been at his best when he’s been cast against type, showing off his comic chops, like in Ghostbusters, but he hasn’t been able to find another franchise he could anchor outside of Thor. His Men In Black film was genuinely awful, and that should have been one of the most actor-proof series out there. His fault? No. But when you’re looking for a distinct, iconic personality, Hemsworth isn’t that guy, and that could mean that post-Thor, his career has to evolve. Paul Rudd is Paul Rudd. He’s like Bugs Bunny. He’s just going to keep being Paul Rudd, popping up and Paul Rudding it up in comedies and dramas and on TV and in movies and people will generally like him and like his stuff and it won’t really be any different. Scarlett Johansson has been Oscar nominated twice now, and she works constantly, and I would argue that while it’s cool she’s finally getting her own Black Widow movie, she doesn’t particularly seem to need Marvel one way or another. I don’t get the feeling Black Widow changes anything for her. She was already on this same career track before Marvel, and she’s made the exact same kind of films this entire time. If anything, they gave her enough action training to make her a credible action lead, but that seems like the kind of thing every young actor has to do at this point anyway. Chris Evans looks like he’s having a blast these days in things like Knives Out and the upcoming Little Shop Of Horrors remake, but I don’t think those films live or die solely on the presence of Chris Evans.

So… do we still have movie stars?

At this point, it feels like the IP exists, and actors are anointed as the keeper of a part for a short period of time, with the idea being that the part is far more important than the actor. If you’re willing to play ball and be a superhero, you’re allowed access to all the rest of it, but even once you’re in the game, you have to be careful. I feel like Don Cheadle is this constant reminder to everyone else in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that they are there at the pleasure of the studio and not vice versa. Marvel’s good at growing talent, catching people at a certain moment in their career, and I don’t think it’s automatically a bad thing that the power balance has switched. But it makes me wonder how we are going to grow new talent if they don’t fit into the superhero mold. Not everyone wants to make that kind of film, but increasingly, it seems like that is the deal you make with the devil.

Here’s a question for you: how do you personally define “movie star”?

I’ve always said it means someone who the audience goes to see regardless of what they’re in. The best example I can give comes from my personal experience when I was first working in theaters in the ‘80s. I would watch people come to the theater knowing exactly what film and what time they wanted. I saw people show up with a vague idea about what was out, just in the mood for a movie. And then, frequently, I would see people come marching up to the box-office and, without hesitation, say something like, “Two for Eddie Murphy!” Eddie Murphy was a no-shit, no-question, no-boundaries movie star at that point, and people more often than not showed up just to see him, with zero idea what he was in. They didn’t care. They didn’t need to. They just plain loved Eddie. That’s a movie star in the purest form.

So who’s left? Tom Cruise? Will Smith? Or are even they dented and human at this point?

I’ll leave you with this thought: the single biggest new star in the last 12 months is, arguably, Baby Yoda. He is also the perfect “star” for this age, because he doesn’t even speak dialogue. He is a wholly-owned creation of Lucasfilm and Disney, and they can do whatever they want with him. He’ll never renegotiate his deal. He’ll never send anyone an embarrassing dick pic that Disney will have to explain. He won’t have a drug problem or problematic tweets or old photos in blackface. Baby Yoda is the future, and as much as I’ve said in the past that I’m not afraid of the way technology and storytelling collide, always seeing room for actors in that equation, it increasingly feels like the bosses are the only ones with any real muscle these days.

And speaking of muscle…

Quasi-Amazing Stories

One of the more memorable television events when I was a kid was the premiere of Amazing Stories. At the time, there was no one bigger than Steven Spielberg in terms of pop-culture currency. His name was more than a name. He was a genre. He was a brand. He had basically shaped ‘80s entertainment in his own image, and the deal he made with NBC for the show was startling. Two years guaranteed on the air in his preferred Sunday night time slot, no matter what. No matter what. Total control. They couldn’t be taken off the air. They couldn’t be moved. They couldn’t be shelved. It was room to do anything.

In the end, I think Amazing Stories was a mixed bag. One of the guys who has been most instrumental in my own success is Mick Garris, and he’s told me many stories over the years about his work on the show. It was a huge platform for him, and he worked closely with Steven Spielberg as story editor. It was definitely a passion project for Spielberg, and it came at a point when he was so powerful that the network accepted those terms because they simply wanted to be able to say they were in business with him. Only he could have gotten that show on the air that way. Anthology shows are scary for networks because they are acts of faith. You don’t really have any idea what you’re going to get from week to week, and you have no guarantee that just because you like one episode, you’ll like the next. Watching the series in 1985, it definitely felt like a gamble when you tuned in. There were episodes I enjoyed a lot like William Dear’s “Mummy Daddy” or Peter Hyams’ “The Amazing Falsworth,” and I remember the “holy shit!” moment of seeing Brad Bird’s “Family Dog” for the first time, but Amazing Stories was very much like Amblin’, Spielberg’s production company, in the way it would whiff on the episodes that missed. You can’t really fault anyone involved. There are plenty of talented people involved, and it’s clear that Spielberg gave people room to make their movies. When you’re moving at the speed that network television requires, you can’t fine-tune and tweak the same way you can with feature films. You had old pros, new faces, and some really oddball choices as directors on that show, and from week to week, you weren’t sure if you were going to get comedy or horror or a romance or science-fiction.

One of the hardest-to-measure but most-important metrics in terms of how something lands in pop culture is word of mouth. When we like something or we’re excited about it, we talk about it. When we talk about things a lot, other people tend to check them out. It’s organic, it’s real, and it’s still the single best way for something to genuinely win people over. You can spend all the money on a marketing campaign you want, but you’ll never beat the power of your friend calling you and saying, “Holy shit, man, I just saw the best movie. You have to come see it with me. It’s so good!” Or telling you about a show they watched so you’ll watch it too so you can talk about it together. Showing up at work the day after the new Survivor so you can second-guess all the choices everyone made at Tribal Council is part of the experience. It’s not just the show or the movie; it’s the sharing of the show or the movie. And I can tell you from my experience in the ‘80s, Amazing Stories was not something people were talking about after that initial launch. It got the big push. It sort of whiffed it. And then it just quietly played out those two years in a bubble of pop culture silence. Even the episodes I liked, I couldn’t find anyone else to talk about them with me. No one was watching. That Sunday night time slot didn’t help. I mean, you had weekly films from directors like Joe Dante, Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Paul Bartel, Irvin Kershner, Robert Zemeckis, and Danny De Vito, and you can’t get people talking about that? It was in 35th place after its first year. In 1985/1986 terms, for a project like that, you’re talking about a real disaster. It made money through repackaging and syndication and home video and foreign markets, and they even spun Brad Bird’s episode off into a whole other series, but overall, when the show went down, it wasn’t particularly missed.

Apple TV+ has spent some serious time and money developing this new revival of Amazing Stories, and based on the first episode, which finally dropped last week, it looks like they have indeed brought back Amazing Stories. The exact same show. With the exact same problems. Which is kind of… well… amazing. There are evidently only seven episodes in the first season of this revival (out of ten that were initially ordered), and I’m curious if there will be a season two. I’ve heard that this first season was a very difficult birth, and looking at the episode they picked as their premiere, I can’t help but think that if this is the best thing they have to hook viewers, they’re in very real trouble. I can’t even tell you what I expect from week two based on this super-soft and fuzzy little time travel piffle. A pair of brothers restoring a house find their lives impacted profoundly when one of them travels back in time thanks to the barometric pressure in the cellar. That’s the logline. Directed by Chris Long and written by Jessica Sharzer, “The Cellar” is okay. It’s sweet, and both Dylan O’Brien and Victoria Pedretti are blandly charming leads. You know where it’s going pretty much the moment it gets rolling, and it offers nothing in terms of surprise along the way. But it’s all very professional and solid and sturdy and entirely okay, and there is absolutely nothing about it that says “OH MY GOD AREN’T YOU GLAD AMAZING STORIES IS BACK?! NOW YOU CAN SEE THIS EVERY WEEK!!” and, I’m sorry, but in a landscape of seemingly-endless television choices, something called Amazing Stories that is being sold on the name of Steven Spielberg needs to make more noise than “The Cellar.”

One of the most fundamental problems is that title. It’s a big title. Amazing Stories. I get the appeal. I get why Spielberg can’t leave it alone. He’s a Rod Serling kid, raised on Twilight Zone, and he knows what it feels like when one of those shows works. He knows just how big a mark it makes on a viewer. Amazing Stories is a promise, though, and this show’s pilot just doesn’t fulfill that promise. I’m sure no one involved set out to make Entirely Adequate Stories, but right now, there’s no wonder or joy evoked by what they’re offering, and if it does continue, it would require some serious refiguring to turn this into the show that the title has always promised but never really delivered. I suspect this will be one of the costlier cautionary fables from the streaming service wars, and further “proof” for financiers that anthology shows aren’t worth the effort. Considering all three of my produced credits were for anthology shows that Mick Garris produced, I have strong feelings about why these shows are so hard, and so hard to get right even if you walk in with the best of intentions. The differences in all three of my experiences (“Cigarette Burns,” “Pro-Life,” and “Skin and Bones”) informed how those episodes ended up playing, and I can tell you that the distance between intent and execution was all about time and money and outside factors and none of that matters. In the end, it’s just what you have onscreen, and I can look at my own episodes and pick apart a million things that went right or wrong, and in doing so, I get it. I get why Amazing Stories is nearly impossible to pull off.

Maybe the rest are better. Maybe there will be some gems among the seven. Maybe they’ll crack the code for season two.

But probably not. Let’s see if we get a third revival in another 20 years once everyone’s getting TV beamed directly into the chips we have implanted in our eyes. I’ll bet that’s the one. I’ll bet that’s when they finally get it right.

I’ll have reviews of two new films for subscribers tomorrow, which brings me to my final point of the morning. Today’s newsletter is a freebie, but you can subscribe to Formerly Dangerous and get all the good stuff plus the ability to actually comment on stories and join the growing FD community! It’s only $7 a month… less if you buy an annual subscription!

Image courtesy of Marvel Studios
Image courtesy of Apple TV+