The New and Improved Leading Man

Heard all the Hollywood hand-wringing about the death of the movie star? About how the only things that can get people to the box office are comic-book heroes and animated sequels? The people who say this definitely haven't seen Magic Mike or Argo. The thing is, the leading man isn't dead, but he's evolving into something a little more complicated. Mark Harris explains the rules of leading men and tells us who is one (Channing Tatum), who isn't (Taylor Kitsch, at least not yet), and why



The ten highest-grossing movies of 2012 included the following: Three adaptations of young-adult novels. Three adaptations of comic books. Two cartoons. One installment in an action series. And one original, non-franchise, live-action movie that was, technically, aimed at adults.

Nine of the ten movies were, or were intended to generate, sequels. The movie aimed at adults was about a man whose teddy bear talks to him. None of this is news. We're all pretty familiar by now with the not-so-brave, no-longer-so-new world of franchises and the adult children who make them. What's most jolting about this list is what's missing from it: movie stars.

I don't mean that they're literally absent: Recognizable men are cast in lead roles. What's missing is, rather, the value stars bring to a movie—a quality long thought to be one of the most reliable and precious commodities in Hollywood. The twenty-first-century movie business, judging by this list, appears to be one in which Skyfall's Daniel Craig counts for neither more nor less than Twilight's Robert Pattinson or The Hobbit's Martin Freeman. It's a business in which you can get to $200 million or $250 million by hiring Andrew Garfield (for The Amazing Spider-Man) or David Schwimmer (for voice work on Madagascar 3). And notably, it is a business in which you will not get to that top ten on the back of someone like Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt, unless they get there on the back of something like Pirates of the Caribbean 5 or Ocean's Whatever.

It's hard to escape the logical conclusion: Movie stars just don't matter anymore. Financially, sociologically, culturally, they're either obsolete or doing a damn good job of pretending to be. Whether it's because they stopped doing what movie stars are supposed to do or we stopped wanting them to do it, here we all are, apparently, in a post-movie-star universe in which the movies seem to be doing just fine without the presence of an entire category of people who have been, for the better part of the past century, the main reason a lot of people went to the movies. And we shouldn't be surprised. If, in 2013, our primary allegiances are to genres and concepts and properties rather than to people, if our biggest modern movie stars are Batman and Bourne and Wolverine and James Bond, and if the most a flesh-and-blood actor can hope is to be chosen to serve as the temporary avatar for one of those characters, then what meaning can the term movie star possibly have?

Plenty, it turns out. We still need movie stars. And perhaps more surprisingly, we still have movie stars—lots of them, and arguably a more talented and interesting variety than at any time in the past thirty years. But they play by new rules, and they have to navigate an industry that often seems hostile to their very existence.

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To make sense of the new movie star universe, it may help to acknowledge that the very words movie star now seem like kryptonite to half of Hollywood's A-list (and A-list aspirants). From Johnny Depp, who is, lest there be any doubt, a movie star: "That 'movie star' stuff, I just don't buy it; it just doesn't make sense to me." From Steve Carell, who has worked very hard to try to become a movie star: "I don't think of myself as a movie star... I'm an actor, and I love my job." From Armie Hammer, the star of the hugely expensive big-studio franchise-wannabe The Lone Ranger: "I personally don't see myself...as a movie star."

This may all come under the heading of protesting too much—the way the second somebody says, "I don't consider myself wealthy," you know they're a lot closer to it than you are. But you can't blame actors for running away from a term that reeks of greed and compromise. Ever since the Reagan-era Wall Street boom infected Hollywood with a bigger-is-better aesthetic and box-office performance became a routine part of plugged-in chatter, the industry and the press have welded the idea of stardom to money so completely that it has been dumbed down all the way to the level of elementary-school math. According to Hollywood and its observers, a star is someone who can open a movie.

But to equate stardom with mere bank-ability ruins the fun—unless your definition of fun is long and tortured analytical discussions of whether Tom Cruise is "still a star," even though nobody wanted to see a man that short play Jack Reacher or, for that matter, see a movie titled Jack Reacher. Beyond that, it misses the truth. For one thing, some actors can indeed open movies every single time and yet are not what we think of as movie stars (specialty acts like Tyler Perry and single-niche performers like Jason Statham), just as there are actors whose box-office records may be spotty but whose stardom is indisputable (Pitt, for one). By the numbers, Adam Sandler is a movie star, but only when he makes an Adam Sandler movie. His stardom, like Abbott and Costello's in the 1940s and Burt Reynolds's in the 1970s, is extraordinarily consistent, but also dependent on satisfying rather than challenging the modest expectations of his target audience. When Sandler tried to break those chains, as he did in Punch-Drunk Love and Funny People, he won over critics but lost his base. Stars shouldn't be constrained by the fact that they do one thing well—nor should the designation of movie star be subject to such casual revision every time the grosses roll in. All stars have flops; real stars survive them.