Is the Movie Star really dead (or dying)?
Does the "Movie Star" label even matter anymore?
Dear Squawkers,
A couple weeks ago, I wrote this post about Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal working on Celine Song’s new movie, Materialists, and I wrote about how Game of Thrones, though the biggest TV show of the last decade, has not produced any movie stars, which further had me thinking about how hard it remains for TV actors to make the leap to film stardom, despite the overall thinning of the boundary between film and TV in the prestige TV era. Charlotte then posed this question for a mailbag:
Sarah wrote, "we're just not making as many movie stars today as we used to." I think this has come up on the site before--is this a reflection of the end of the monoculture? Is it a specifically western thing - are Korea/Japan/China producing more universally beloved stars? When did the change happen? And who is a movie star and who isn't anyways? There's the core list I think we can all agree on: Julia, Tom C., Tom H., Sandra, Brad, Denzel, Angelina, Samuel L. Jackson, Leo, Will Smith, probably The Rock, maybe George, maybe Anne? Is Anthony Hopkins a movie star? Is Channing Tatum? Are Scarlett Johansson or Meryl Streep or Natalie Portman? Was Chadwick Boseman? Margot Robbie might be approaching? I can't think of anyone under 30, though maybe Millie Bobbie Brown is getting there? (Sorry - this question has gotten away from me.)
I held it for the newsletter because I think it deserves the deepest of all dives. We HAVE been talking about the death of the Movie Star for a long time, since I started writing for LaineyGossip in 2010, but the phenomenon started happening in the 2000s (alongside the death of physical media!). Basically, if you weren’t a Movie Star by 2001, the odds of you becoming one grew much lower. But first, let’s clarify what we’re talking about.
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