Stars and Superheroes

Last week, I read a terrific New York Times article by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Wesley Morris titled “We’re Out of Movie Stars. Whose Fault Is That?” A few days after reading that article, writer/director and now new co-chairman and co-CEO of DC Studios James Gunn tweeted out that Henry Cavill would no longer reprise the role of Superman and the next film would focus on a younger Man of Steel. This news was a bit of a surprise as Cavill had a cameo in the credits scene of Black Adam and even left his Netflix series The Witcher presumably under the assumption that his schedule would now be filled with playing Superman again. Cavill took to his Instagram to gracefully acknowledge his disappointment (personally, I don’t feel like this is the last we’ve seen of Cavill as Superman; based on the success of Spider-Man: No Way Home, it feels like an Andrew Garfield thing where some kind of multiverse event allows him to return and get to shine as fans acknowledge he was a good actor saddled with material that didn’t catch on critically or commercially).

I don’t really know who Henry Cavill is as an actor outside of a franchise mold. I know he’s handsome and charismatic. I’d love to see him play Napoleon Solo again in a new Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie (recasting Armie Hammer as partner Illya Kuryakin, obviously). I also thought he was fantastic in Mission: Impossible - Fallout. But Cavill’s fortunes and the fortunes of other actors of his generation and younger, as Morris points out in his article, are far too tied to Intellectual Property (IP) rather than anything that would let them be stars on their own terms.

During the Golden Age of Hollywood, stars were typically locked into onerous contracts. You signed a 7-year deal with MGM or Warner Bros. or Columbia or some other major player, and then you did the films they told you to do or, should you pass, you were “suspended” and didn’t work at all or you were loaned out to another studio. It was a fancy form of indentured servitude. Granted, it was indentured servitude that could come with fame and wealth, but the actor had little say over the projects they starred in or even how the studio would construct their image.

Stars eventually won their freedom (thanks in no small part to the De Havilland Law, which allowed actors greater autonomy), and yet studios still relied heavily on famous faces to sell movies. It’s not that Hollywood has ever been shy about adaptations and IP, but until the 21st century the thinking went that it’s a safer bet to rely on a charismatic individual rather than a property audiences may or may not know.

We live in a far different age where there are movie stars, but they are subservient to the product, and in this way, the studios have regained the upper hand. Henry Cavill is a human being. You have to negotiate with him, work around his schedule, and, should you choose to build a film around him (i.e. a “star vehicle”), you’ll need to hope that the audience will then buy Cavill as this new character. It’s a lot of work, but in the past, it was deemed work worth doing because the marketplace wasn’t as crowded. You take a rising comic star like Bill Murray who has proved himself to audiences on SNL and in films like Caddyshack and Stripes, put him in a movie where he and other funny guys fight ghosts and tell jokes, and you have a hit. If people don’t like it, they can go watch television or see a different movie (but then they’ll miss out on the zeitgeist). Today’s options are diffuse and the Superman IP doesn’t make demands of the studio. It is there to be employed permanently and is bigger than any puny actor.

In the mid-1950s, George Reeves worried about being identified with Superman. He saw it as a children’s character, and while he was happy to have young fans, he felt that the role itself was beneath a real actor. Reading Cavill’s post, he acknowledges that the character is bigger than himself or any one person, and while that’s true (Superman is objectively more famous than Henry Cavill), it’s hard to escape the melancholy and disappointment. For today’s current crop of stars, the superhero movie is supposed to be the thing that opens other doors, not closes them as Reeves felt it did for him. Chris Evans plays Captain America because it means he gets to be in stuff like Snowpiercer, Gifted, and Knives Out.

But the audience’s appetite right now isn’t for the star, but for the IP. As Morris asks—whose fault is that? My answer is that there’s enough blame to go around. We’re treating timidity as wisdom because the Internet makes us feel the chaos of modern life more acutely. It’s not so much that things are worse now than they’ve ever been as much as technology asks us to be clued in all of the time. Even if you were to take social media out of the equation, you’d still have 24-hour news networks and a bevy of streaming channels and websites. We feel like we have less time because so many entertainment options are making demands of it, and we don’t want to risk “wasting” time on something we don't like.

Studios, for their part, are also risk-averse. They don’t want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars (the current price tag for a blockbuster and the belief that people will only go to movie theaters to see massive spectacle) on an original idea or unknown property buoyed only by the names above the marquee. Some films have tried to counteract this problem by loading up on stars, but that doesn’t seem like a surefire bet. Amsterdam landed with a thud at the box office despite 15 names on the poster. Stardom is in a tricky place where it simply doesn’t go as far as it used to in making a sale. People will still trip over themselves to get a selfie with Dwayne Johnson, but turning out to Black Adam is a different story.

By the same token, I don’t know if stardom has migrated elsewhere. It’s one thing to be a star on TikTok or YouTube, but there’s little evidence that can translate to selling tickets or subscriptions unless you’ve reached a rarefied level. That’s not to diminish anyone’s success on a social media platform; I’m simply saying that there’s not much appetite to see if their online star power is enough to power offline ticket sales to a new movie or TV show. We’ve now reserved the biggest cultural splashes for IP, which are bigger than any individual’s star persona.

On the one hand, I think Cavill will be fine. He’s handsome, charismatic, and, he’s already got a Warhammer 40,000 TV series at Amazon in the works. In short, he’s a movie star that’s already moved on to the next IP. But there will be no role that Cavill gets to call his own independent of a pre-existing property, and he, like so many actors in Hollywood, are now going to be at the mercy of IP machines that function fine without their participation. For all the talk about stories that make us soar and touch our lives, this is dehumanizing. It is the cold blades of the machine slicing through anything that can’t be owned outright to make room for the most comforting option available.

I admit I’m a bit of a weird outlier when it comes to movies. I feel (and I have no hard evidence to back this up) that a lot of people just watch movies to be entertained and don’t think too much about the process of the entertainment. Tom Cruise used to entertain audiences by starring in films like Magnolia, Collateral, and Jerry Maguire. Now he entertains people by doing Mission: Impossible and nothing else until he’s physically unable to do the stunts and audience will only accept him in supporting roles rather than the handsome and daring Ethan Hunt. And when he’s done hanging off buildings and jumping out of airplanes, the Mission: Impossible series will likely live on with an attractive, younger actor as the new face of the franchise. And perhaps the series will move to Paramount+ to lure in streaming subscribers, and people will say, “Eh, may as well give it a chance.” And they’ll see a young actor who was good in some Sundance thing you vaguely heard about about to do some incredible stunt before a CGI double takes over.

Afterwards, you might be asked by a friend, “What you have seen lately,” and you won’t say, “The new Young Actor movie.” You’ll say “The new Mission: Impossible. It’s got so-and-so from that indie movie and that TV show. It was okay.” Franchises are fine for what they are, but they should never be mistaken for stardom.