Hollywood relies heavily on networking. Older actors have larger networks.
Prolific actors tend to also own their own production companies. Adam Sandler and Tom Cruise both own the production companies for their movies, which means they can have basically any role they want. Adam Sandler stars in dopey comedies set in on tropical islands with all of the same people because he likes getting paid to hang out with his friends in nice places.
Also, I think we can't discount how amazing plastic surgery is anymore. We don't see "old" actors hardy ever anymore. Even in the 90s, balding actors were pretty common, now you never see them. TC looks 35; same with Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd, etc. Why go with someone new when Brad Pitt looks just as young, but is a known quantity?
I am 35, and none of those people look close to 35. There is a certain look to the youthfulness of the skin on the face that always gives it away. Whatever that subcutaneous fat layer or whatever is that deteriorates and makes things sag or deflate has yet to be fixed in a believable way.
I also assume the films have heavy digital editing to make them look younger.
35 is an exaggeration but Tom Cruise in the new Top Gun, and Brad Pitt in Bullet Train, look closer to 35 than to 60 or 58.
Cruise taped a "thanks to coming to the theaters" thing that ran before Top Gun when I saw it, and it definitely looked about a decade older. Call it 50, while his character looked 40, and he's actually 60. I found it useful to calibrate my guess around how much was due to makeup and movie magic, and how much due to skincare and surgery.
> Cruise taped a "thanks to coming to the theaters" thing that ran before Top Gun when I saw it, and it definitely looked about a decade older.
Yeah I noticed this too. His speech was slower and forced (it seemed like he was having trouble breathing). The skin around his neck was tight in a way that you only see in more elderly folks.
The movie was nothing like this but in that tape it was just completely obvious he was a 60 year old dude. Nothing wrong with that of course you just don't normally see him looking like that and didn't even in the movie itself.
They look good for their age but it's not shocking they're pushing 60, at best I might accept late 40s. Very much Cruise in Maverick and even thought that about Brad on a recent viewing of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood which he filmed at 54.
I think there is also something else afoot whether it is health care, skin products, easier living in general, etc... I am often mind blown when I look at pictures of athletes or movie stars from decades ago. They often would look 50-60 years old but then you see they were like 31 when the picture was taken.
The Brimley/Cocoon line twitter account sort of shows this. Wilford Brimley was 50 when Cocoon came out in 1985 - I thought he was easily 70.
Some people just age like that. I think a lot of it is genetic. If you bald and go grey at 40, you're more or less going to look like that for the next 30 years.
Uh.... shit. Hopefully that's a look en vogue at some point during that time. Norwood 3 vertex snuck up on me over the last year and my chest hair seems like it got bleached overnight.
If you we worth hundreds of millions, even billions, you'd probably look a lot younger too. And I'm not talking just surgery: better health, less stress, more medical care.
I bet it's much more stressful to run giant empires than the typical desk job. And paying the bills isn't that hard - if it is you need to move immediately to a lower cost of living area, you need to save for retirement after all.
People struggling to pay the bills usually don't have the option to "just move to a lower cost of living area", because moving costs money and they also don't have the funds to cover the time it takes to find a new job (presumably paying more relative to the cost of living? how?) in the new location.
Yes they do. Especially now with the worker shortages, you can get a job anywhere. You can get by in many areas by working at mcdonalds, and people who can't figure this out don't deserve my tax dollars.
They're also not staying in the sun for long or going to tanning salons. If you stay under the sun, skin will suffer and age more then if you stay out of it.
Some of these actors may have tanned, like Stallone, but many others were careful to not do that.
Which indicates I see myself in the mirror all the time, and I likely associate with others around my age, day in and day out, and I look at any of those 60 year old celebs, and they do not look like my cohort.
And then I specified exactly what about their face - which is a lack of a certain “bounce” seen in younger people’s faces.
Adam Sandler is like the modern version of the Stratemeyer Syndicate behind the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
Most of his movies are exactly the same with different dressing. I think Happy Gilmore was the prototype. Same plot, same type of girl, same jokes, different SNL buddies making an appearance.
As my friend pointed out, he had a strangely age appropriate wife in Hustle. :)
But mainly I'd say Adam Sandler is a good actor when he's acting in things other people have written, and he's just having fun getting paid to hang out with friends in nice places when he's in movies he writes.
As long as he keeps switching off between good and dopey, I think he can run his con for a long time.
In Uncut Gems, he was only an actor, as opposed to the vast majority of his work, which comes from his production company (Happy Madison Productions). Of the films from that production house, "Hustle" is the only one that stands out as a quality production; the rest very much adhere to the formula described above.
I remember seeing that and thinking wow, a Sandler film can be good!
Other than that I think you have to go a long way back for toned down 'dopey' though, before he hit that particular stride. Or maybe I was just younger and not so bothered by it - can't think of an example at the moment.
It's networking, plus the fact that they often own their own production companies, plus the ability to portray a younger role well into their 50s. Brad Pitt is older now than Marlon Brando was in The Godfather.
You have a lot more professional options if you can pull off a younger character.
ISTR lots of articles around and since the turn of the millennium about the TV/Film desirability gradient starting to reverse, at least for people not already at the pinnacle of movie stardom, with young actors with modest early career movie success actively working to love to TV, rather than vice versa.
EDIT: And, though less frequently, I've seen similar things for other jobs in making filmed entertainment, with TV getting a lot more respect as a medium for storytelling.
I get your drift, but having just watched Lost City, Pitt definitely is showing his age. I'm guessing tons of makeup, lighting effects, and editing are responsible for his looking younger in other films. Check the trailer @ 2:21 or so -
I’d also be curious how much of this is simply the influence of modern sun protective practices. Are actors apparent ages naturally changing more slowly than in the pre sunscreen days?
You go with someone new because they are the fraction of the price and headache as someone with star power. That's why when it comes to quantity over quality productions in the streaming era, all the leads are people you've probably never seen before.
My theory is that Movies are not the dominant cultural force for the younger generation. Their celebrity idols are on social media ( and musicians but nothing new there).
The no movie stars thing was interesting. I was thinking about Chris Pratt who seems like one of the most recently created "superstars"(as in he's a lot of big movies) and yet he doesn't feel like a brand the way Cruise or Schwarzenegger or Aniston do.
Even from 2004, when Brad Pitt was arguably less popular than in the 1990s, we can see that Tom Holland has never reached the same 'peaks' that Brad Pitt had reached. Tom Holland blew up in December 2021 (though never reaching two of Pitt's peaks), and is now down to a level of interest lower than Brad Pitt is today.
Yea, but compare apples to apples. Go back to the 90's and everyone from all age ranges knows who Pitt and Aniston are. I assume the only people who know who Holland and Zendaya are are much younger than us (I'd need to Google them as well--haven't a clue who they are).
A friend's indie band entered a hiatus after a disappointing tour across the northeast (OH, PA, NJ, NY, MA, ME). Simply put, they all realized it isn't enough to be talented musicians, they need to learn how to be better entertainers (which is increasingly synonymous with influencers)
1) That hugely underestimates his ability as a songwriter. Springsteen, as a songwriter, is on par with people like Bacharach, in my opinion.
2) The traditional record company system pumped an ENORMOUS amount of money behind him to market him initially. So much so that he is embarassed about it to this day.
3) The E Street Band were some of the absolute best musicians around. The old joke about "Man, I don't know who Bruce Springsteen is, but he must be amazing. He has Clarence Clemons playing triangle in his band."
I'd say that guy was honing in on "entertainer" - Springsteen is a much better performer and entertainer than he is a songwriter or musician generally. The man's still performing incredible 3 hour shows at 72 years old.
I'm not aware of him doing any social media influencing - he had earned his reputation long before social media.
Born in the USA (1984) is one of the best selling albums of all time, something like 30 million copies. You can say it's touring, but I say that album is the thing that made him huge.
And it wasn't just album sales. At the time it was also constantly on radio and MTV (back when MTV played music).
I'd say he's a very good song writer, average (professional) singer, great entertainer.
His Broadway show (currently on Netflix) is deeply inciteful and demonstrative of his path, and his skill as an entertainer.
It's harder to break out now with everyone one and their friend having a youtube channel, but don't underestimate the amount of work it took for Bruce to breakout in the early 70s. It was ever thus for entertainers, thousands aspire and only a very few make it.
Those 40 and up only account for 30% of ticket sales [1], despite being nearly 50% of the population. This is a figure I find rather shocking given that these ages include those with children and those with an abundance of time in retirement.
Another factor may be the skyrocketing costs of movie tickets. This source [2] shows that tickets went from $4.35 in 1996 to $9.16 in 2021, which exceeds the rate of inflation. Additionally, I'm not aware of any tickets to be had for $9. Tickets are exorbitantly expensive these days [3].
> This is a figure I find rather shocking given that these ages include those with children
That should actually explain it.
My wife and I used to see a movie or two every weekend. Then we had kids seven years ago. I think I've been to the theater maybe four times since then (and two of those were without my wife).
That is really interesting. In my town, to see Jurassic World tomorrow (Wed) at 20:30 in the UK is £13 per adult. This includes a mostly empty cinema, a terrible seat, 10-20 minutes of adverts for viewing start time and £6 for a large pepsi max.
So minus the pepsi, it is $31.09USD for 2 adults.
Even if I reached out to my admittedly few dozen facebook family from 16-90 year old and said I sorted all them out for $1 a film. No one would go. I mean maybe 1-2 people would go but even then I'd be mind blown.
I thought UK cinema tickets actually dropped in price quite a bit recently. As a counterexample, still in a small city in the UK, Vue has seats today for 'The Rise of Gru' for £7 per seat - in a nice venue with reclining seats. And you can bring popcorn from the next-door supermarket for £2 per bag. The only downside is that you would have to watch 'The Rise of Gru'...
Hollywood is churning out Transformers, Marvel, and Fast & Furious movies by the dozen. I don’t think this really appeals to most people over a certain age.
The video game industry is also larger than all other major entertainment media industries (film/television/music) combined, so there’s that to compete with.
It’s getting some credit for a ticket sale bump. I wonder if the joke for some kids isn’t just that the minions are lame but movies as a whole are lame?
I just think it's a cyclical response to life becoming increasingly casual. In my public high school (~2005), we started doing "Formal Fridays" where we would dress up in suits. It was just a dumb, ironic fad that spanned multiple cliques and essentially went viral. At its peak, one enterprising friend bought a gross of hideous yellow-and-black "swiss cheese ties" and started selling them. Teachers were extremely concerned that it was some sort of gang/hidden meaning thing...
But I digress. Altogether, I think it's good for the industry that kids are gathering at movie theaters again and doing things like this that make memories.
Compare the annual gross sales of video games vs. Hollywood blockbusters. Yet gaming is given short shrift.
My kids are all on their phones watching tiktok and youtube. They were traumatized
when a prominent YouTuber died this weekend of cancer.
Movies? They used to be into the MCU when it was relatively fresh, but now it's stale, like Harry Potter. My youngest went to see TopGun Maverick with me, but wanted to spend time with me more than seeing an old boomer movie retread.
Gaming seems to get the same sort of short shrift as sports. Which is to say, they're competing for entertainment dollars, but not necessarily as much as cultural referents. And note that on HN you'll see much more discussion of movies than of sports... so it should be easy to see where that blind spot would be different (either opposite, or ignoring both areas).
It's an interesting thing because some games are much more narrative, and others are much more competition-oriented. The latter seem to be driving a lot of the current $$$$.
Youtube and social media exist in a new sort of advertising-dollar-pie-expanding competiting-but-also-newly-different genre of free content. And kids will eat that shit up since they aren't rolling in money for increasingly-expensive movies.
A lot of movie genres have basically just moved to cable and streaming. Funny that yesterday's "free" kids entertainment (cable, since parents were subscribed anyway) is today's paywalled streaming content.
Is Hollywood, by itself, threatened by Tiktok any more than it was by MTV? Between streaming and theatrical, Hollywood is doing great. The streaming bubble has to deflate some, though - it's been running at a loss for a decade - we'll see how big a hit that is.
It sort of makes sense that competitive games get more eyeballs than narrative ones, right? Most single player, narrative focused games are designed to be beaten, anyone interested in enjoying those plots can get that experience on their own. Most of us can't get the experience of being good at DOTA or whatever it is people watch nowadays.
In the last 20 years more and more movies started delivering appropriate casting for f->m age gaps, mainly because of pr0n revolution and popularity of MILF trope.
American Pie 1999. Jennifer Coolidge -> Eddie Thomas = 19.
Don Jon 2013. Julianne Moore -> Joseph Gordon-Levitt = 21.
>It’s also the age of 35 year old women playing the mothers of 25 year old men
Its my gripe with the latest Dune adaptation. No way that actress was old enough to be Paul's mom unless she had him when she was 6 years old. She looked more like his siter than his mother.
It bugs me when they don't have age apropriate family members with such obviously wide age gaps.
I understand your complaint in the larger context of popular culture. But in the context of Dune, which takes place 1000s of years in the future, and in which there exist a genetically manipulating pseudo-cult group of witches/spies who are desperately seeking the ascendancy of humankind to a higher plane of existence, it is slightly more reasonable that Jessica Atreides looks the way she does, as a hyper attractive concubine that was intended (you might say "designed") to eventually develop the bloodline of a pseudo-god. But that also only really makes sense if you're invested in the narrative.
The real kicker is that Paul probably should have looked younger. In the novel, he arrives on Arrakis when he is 15.
This is the basic problem with adapting Dune. It has absolute loads of worldbuilding, and tells a reasonably complex plot at the same time. It doesn't matter how many times it's adapted, the viewer is just going to have a better time if they have read the book.
Jessica is a Bene Gesserit, they are explicitly noted to stay youthful in appearance and live a long time. This is one of many hundreds of details that just have to be shown, there's no time to explain them.
> No way that actress was old enough to be Paul's mom unless she had him when she was 6 years old.
If you know anything about Dune's lore, you would know why this is the case. The movie absolutely does not go into enough detail about this or explain the abilities of Bene Gesserit.
Well there is only 12 years age difference between actors, but Chalamet looks 15-17 all the time. Maybe creators wanted to emphasize strict gene selection happening behind curtains, and people in year 10,191 have better healthcare/skincare on position of queen.
Never met 40+ woman who looked as if she just finished university? Smooth skin, no moles or wrinkles, energetic. Genes + upkeep + generally healthy lifestyle + good sleep. And probably no kids.
Its not outrageous to have 15 year old son and looking very fine, plenty of world even in 2022 start having kids before/at 20. Look at all the photos of young moms from Ukraine escaping, often almost teenagers around young mom, in age that here where I live local women start thinking about having a child.
Considering the peculiar genetic projects of the Bene Gesserit and other Dune groups is unnecessary: the real world trend of somewhat aged people looking so good that they can pass as significantly younger (in particular, actors who are credible as younger characters) can be easily and obviously extrapolated to the wealthy nobility of a far future high tech SF setting.
Jessica Atreides at about 40 is supposed to look so extraordinarily youthful that a younger actress like Rebecca Ferguson is needed.
This is not a new trend though. In Lawrence Oliviers Hamlet from 1948, Hamlets mother is played by an actress which is 10 years younger than Olivier.
The article shows a graph of the age gap between leads, and it shows it slightly narrowing, while both men an women stars are getting older on average.
They don't cite the source, but the claim in the article is that the average age of top-billed actors has gone up faster than the average age of the audience, not that yesteryear had 0 older stars.
His latest movie was also filmed 3 years ago in large part due to how long CGI takes but also how long movies are edited. So not only do Actors age more between filming and release, but it also takes longer for a new actor to catch on.
Aka they film a movie when their 20, it’s a breakout hit when their 23, their next movie comes out when their 26.
It was filmed 3 years ago because the release was delayed due to the pandemic. They didn't want it to flop because people weren't going to the theaters.
It was finished filming almost a year before they started shutting down movie theaters for the pandemic and they didn’t release promotional materials back then.
So, that pushes the earliest summer release as 2 to 2.5 years after filming each scene assuming COVID actually delayed things.
You can see they had settled on June 2020 as the release date, but, you know what happened next. That release date was fully locked in until it became clear COVID wasn't going away.
There were other, earlier delays: the film was initially scheduled for 2019, but they spent most of that year doing reshoots.
Implying gift/inheritance not theft. If I was a grandpa and had one in my shed, I'd probably give it to my grandkid that happens to be a top gun pilot/instructor.
Yep, and the reverse also... 35+yo people playing highscoolers was the norm.
I mean, i guess it's kinda hard to film scenes not-in-chronological-order with a teenager who visibly changes during the filming, but it's not an impossible thing to do.
I was rewatching earlier seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and it's hilarious that the character Xander Harris(0) was perceived as a scrawny high school nerd.
> I was rewatching earlier seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and it's hilarious that the character Xander Harris(0) was perceived as a scrawny high school nerd.
Uh, except he wasn't perceived as scrawny, and was a jock-adjacent slacker, almost an anti-nerd.
Funny that actors in their 20s, especially early 20s isn't the obvious solution when bodily change has slowed but age can still easily pass for HS aged.
> Funny that actors in their 20s, especially early 20s isn't the obvious solution when bodily change has slowed but age can still easily pass for HS aged.
They are. Sure, there are some that are wildly out of that range, but since someone else raised BtVS let's look at how old the main cast was in 1997, when they were playing sophomores in high school:
I hard that in the recent book from the Howard brothers.
If you are under 18 there are all sorts of restrictions on hours worked, supervision, etc. So it is a lot easier to get a 18+ actor to play a 12-17 year old than someone the actual age.
Part of the reason child actors struggle to transition to adult roles. 3-4 year enforced gap in their career.
Now do the actors of Beverly Hills 90210. When the show started, Ian Ziering was 26. Jason Priestly was 21. Lukey Perry was 24. Gabrielle Carteris was 29. Shannon Doherty was 23.
It’s seems more reasonable to use 26 year old actors to play a ~16 year old high school students than 11 year olds.
Daniel Radcliffe on the other hand was actually 11-12 when playing an 11-12 year old character. By comparison Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy simply didn’t fit nearly as well because he was a 2 years older. https://fantasytopics.com/harry-potter-cast-real-life-ages-d...
I haven't seen a conclusive answer. My search results suggest that she may be 22, but it is mostly based on the fact that she has some voice acting credits from 2003. Someone on Reddit mentioned that they read an article saying "(...) she moved to LA w her family when she was 6, and then took up acting classes “a while later”" and this suggest that voice acting would probably be after this. So she would be from 1997 at least and that would make her 25 (or more). The show had its premiere on January 2021.
Regardless it is remarkable or even more remarkable.
I looked her up, because my daughter was asking about her.
I've run into a few celebrity actors in real life. They all look quite a bit older than on screen, and much less handsome/beautiful in real life. Hollywood makeup and lighting works very well, they know their craft!
Some of this is just the lag time between filming and when you actually see an actor. Top Gun Maverick isn’t even out and it was filmed between 3 September 2018 - July 2019.
Add some time between when you actually see a movie and you see an actor in real live and they may have been 5+ years younger when it was actually filmed.
I'd add that the camera also adds 10 lbs. Meaning that due to the physics of the optics and sensors, faces get flattened out and people look 'fat' as a result.
So, to compensate, actors tend to be a lot skinnier in real life. Like, 'yo, you need a cheeseburger' skinnier. My brother lived in LA for a number of years and would occasionally run into celebs. He said that when running into one he would first always say to himself 'Hey, that person looks a lot like a skinnier and shorter version of ___". And, lo, it would just be that actor, but without all the makeup and lighting and wardrobe.
Movies about high school go back to the 1950s, nearly always with a cast of "teenagers" that have lines and receding hairlines and are 28 years old. To me, they look ridiculous pretending to be kids.
One exception is the movie "Over The Edge" with a cast of all unknown first time acting high school kids. It worked well. The movie made Matt Dillon a star. I'm surprised more directors don't take a chance like that.
How often does that work though? Actual teenage actor are less experienced and usually worse than older actors. There are also child labor laws that don’t allow them to work as many hours, which may slow the whole production down if they’re in the main cast.
It worked with many other series, like kid-to-adult series, eg. Harry Potter. Yeah, sure, it took a bit longer than 7 years, but the age difference (actor vs character) were not that large even at the end of filming).
Another example is the 1968 Romeo and Juliet, where the leads were kids. It's the only version of the story that really works. Both West Side Story and its remake had the "kids" way too old to be believably besotted with each other.
I'm always torn on this sort of thing here. I thought your post was funny, but I don't come to HN for funny. If I want this sort of thing (and more), I go to Reddit. I'd rather see thought-provoking discussion when I come to HN. (And sure, I often don't get that, for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with humor, but that's what I want, at least.) Your post was especially jarring because it didn't really hint that the link I was clicking on would reveal that it was a joke, and it ended up really knocking me out of the mood I was in.
Movie stars are not the top draw anymore. Franchises and brands are. People used to go to see an Arnold Swarzenegger movie or a Dustin Hoffman movie. Today they go to see a Star Wars movie or an Avengers movie. Actors are still important of course, but the stars are replaceable.
Stars who get their fame from a franchise tend to have a hard time selling tickets outside the franchise. (Harrison Ford being the exception of course.)
I’d claim that there’s so much familiarity and energy directed towards the development and marketing of these actors that it’s probably tough to establish the next generation.
You're also seeing the effects of plastic surgery and/or aggressive anti-aging procedures. Actors are aging slower, superficially, and this is leaving less leading or main roles (in an already diminished blockbuster schedule) open to a new younger group of actors. The same actors are staying around longer. For marketing reasons, there is less incentive to debut a new actor (unless it's a serious prestige picture), and the actors get caught in a weird state of body modification and refusing to age. A lot of their faces move oddly now. This goes for male and female actors.
I saw Tom Cruise at the Silverstone racetrack with Mercedes during the British Grand Prix. Seeing him without makeup was a huge change from how he looked in the latest Top Gun movie. He actually looked his age.
I think Nicole Kidman has flat out broken her face with all of the plastic surgery she has gotten in the last couple years. She might look more attractive by strange Hollywood/LA standards, but she has seriously limited her own ability to emote with her face. She looks like she's practically wearing a mask now.
Very much so, advancements in cosmetic surgery as well as the strict training and supplements that were not available for older generations of actors. Take someone like Kumail Nanjiani who very clearly were on HGH for his role in The Eternals
The effect of steroids, and ultra aggressive cutters, on male actors is pretty outrageous. It's more outrageous, though, that a lot of the male actors refuse to admit it and in turn will try to sell or advertise their workouts. I think Nanjiani was kind of the nail in the coffin to the idea that actors were natty, though. His body recomp, in the time frame, was truly comical.
Tom Cruise obviously works very hard at staying in shape and training for the stunts. It's not like he just shows up and says his lines like most actors.
I would say Tom Cruise is probably the biggest male movie star for exactly what you say. His performances have a degree of authenticity to them that is unique. When you see the stunts, you're often seeing him, and this gives his films a unique thrill and feel.
That said, Top Gun had some pretty incredible makeup and/or CGI for his face. The lighting in that movie was also phenomenal. The result was an almost uncanny valley look to him where he looked simultaneously old and young all at once. I was especially thrown off by the pre-movie screener he produced that thanked the audience for seeing the film in theatres. He looked a solid 5-10 years older in that screener compared to Top Gun, which was filmed mostly in 2019.
Yes, he definitely doesn't follow the convention approach like other leading actors. You might even call him a "maverick" for having a strong independent opinion on how to make and showcase movies.
China is also destroying the movie industry as well. They are too large of a market not to cater to and have a rigorous set of requirements for what's acceptable in a film.
Some things you would expect, like don't mention Taiwan, or being critical of China. There's some weird stuff too, like no "time travel" and no "ghosts".
> China is also destroying the movie industry as well.
China may be changing the "Summer Blockbuster" segment of the industry but it's quite the stretch to say they are destroying the whole thing. Plenty of great movies still come out every year.
There's plenty of argument that the Academy Awards aren't necessarily the best movies but even if you look at the movies represented this year, there were a lot of good ones and I don't think any of them were influenced by China. Obviously you can't prove it unless the filmmakers confirm it, but certainly there are a lot of movies with themes that would be unacceptable to Chinese censors.
Maybe the plot of "Transformers 7" isn't as good as it could have been without Chinese influence but as long as movies like "The Power of the Dog" (or "Licorice Pizza" or "Belfast" or "Flee" if animation is more up your alley or ... take your pick) are coming out, I'd say the industry is doing ok.
It’s not so much that time travel itself is banned, it’s that the Chinese government has a bunch of rules that make time travel movies impossible to execute.
For example, the Chinese government wishes to protect the dignity and honor of historical culture. And that means, any movie made of those time periods must fundamentally be serious.
Also, it’s possible that whoever is running the movie review board personally thinks time travel is “too silly”.
It’s hard to keep up with. I watched a video essay on YouTube on why Chinese horro movies are so bad and the main reason, it argued, was that the rules for what you can and cannot show changes so quickly that you want to get your movie out fast in fear of your plot device becoming banned before release
>here’s my western source claiming Chinese totally don’t discriminate
I’ve traveled extensively in China. From my own personal experience they are extremely racist. The difference is night and day, you cross the “border” at the airport and the ads all become incredibly pale.
Hong Kong and tier-1 China are basically everything you’d imagine in a white supremacists wet dream, but Asian.
They don’t possess any concept of white guilt, they have no cultural shame and are not susceptible to identity politics. They are “friendly supremacist”. They will smile in your face producing xxx,xxx,xxx widget per year while hating your guts.
China's middle class was about 3% of its population in 2000. It's now around 50% of its population. The number of people there able to afford going to the movies is substantially higher now.
A movie can make back its budget just by being a hit in China.
This is how we get movies like Skyscraper(2018)[0]. $120M budget. $70M from US/Canada. $300 from "worldwide" and most of that was from China. Just the Chinese opening weekend alone was $48M.
Transformers: Age of Extinction. $210M budget. China alone provided $300M of profit.
All you need to do is hire Chinese actors for side characters, set a bit of your movie in China and not talk about Taiwan. Easy money =)
I think its interesting that two of the most bankable stars of their respective times are/were enormous guys: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Dwayne the Rock Johnson.
Obviously films can be produced without aiming to enter the Chinese market, but the highest budgets will go to the films which can, and they'll have higher marketing budgets and so on.
The oldest of actors and actresses don't seem to be out there, in the public eye 24-7, as the younger set does.
It's going to be very, very hard to have another Cruise, or Costner, or Johnson, etc., with the baggage literally every younger actor is carrying these days. It will take new faces, but again, who we know nothing about. Which is possible, how?
I don’t think it’s going to be a problem, if anything, public attention is something they have to fight for instead of being a burden.
Tom Holland, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Zendaya, for example, are in their twenties, hugely popular, even among millenials, and probably they will be still popular in twenty years
Holland is going to fade as soon as people realize he can't comfortably play a teenage boy anymore. Moviegoers don't really like "squeaky" in lead male actors. I don't know who Anya Taylor-Joy is, and can't say that anything Zendaya has ever been in has made me want for more Zendaya in a leading role. She's utterly replacable.
>Moviegoers don't really like "squeaky" in lead male actors.
Unless you mean something different by "squeaky" than what I think you do, then Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an example of a successful actor who fits that description, don't you agree?
I watch a lot of movies but never superhero movies. Super hero actors haven't crossover to mainstream. A guy like the rock crossed from wrestling to many genres of film and tv, I can't think of someone who came from the superhero world and was as successful in other genres.
It'd be good to see the age trends of major Hollywood executives too; I can't imagine they were ever especially young but are we possibly just having close to zero new blood coming in over the last few decades so the ones making the decisions are still the ones who decided all these names should be stars in the first place.
Beyond that a lot of it would be that society has changed in a manner that it's just very hard to have a movie star today that has the level of widespread fame that a Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt attained in the 90s.
You've also got a lot more actors who know how to handle their careers long enough to protect their status; there's a template the likes of Robert Redford built out by getting so involved in the overall process that still helps a lot.
Coincidentally, last night I saw "Solitary Man" (2009) starring Michael Douglas, who was 65 at the time (now 77). He played a character who had a series of one night stands with much (very much) younger women, so he was still cast at that age as a kind of sex symbol.
It only grossed $5 million though, below its budget. Too bad, because the cast was amazing: also Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Jenna Fischer, Jesse Eisenberg, Mary-Louise Parker.
Reminds me of this old SNL sketch about an aging Sean Connery trying to get on every young female actress, and flatulating while the stagehand tries to help him into position. My Googling skills suck and I can't find a YouTube of it, all I can find are the Jeopardy! sketches.
I'm 45 and have zero interest in watching anything with 1980s actors. In fact, all of those names would ensure that I never even give it a chance. Those guys are all washed up as hell.
Haven't been able to watch Deniro since I saw him get all slobby drunk and try to talk during an award show in the 90s. Most of these people have proven themselves ridiculous, making it very hard to watch them in a movie...Tom Cruise especially.
The part you're missing is that Top Gun would've been readily available in rental stores around when those kids (and I was one of them) were starting to be able to get our parents to let us watch them.
The part I'm missing is how Millennials being familiar with Tom Cruise and/or Top Gun is particularly relevant when everyone is familiar with Tom Cruise and/or Top Gun.
These are bankable assets because everyone is familiar.
TL;DR the industry is risk averse, and like the music scene, A&R people and lawyers and finance now prefer machine backed algo models, which say "stick to known star vehicles, and franchises, and add one starlet for an upside risk of a breakout you can capitalise next swing round"
If some kid wins, in 50 years time they'll be this statistic too, making "Planet of the Apes Next Gen, Episide XXXVI" pretending to be 25 years younger.
This is a golden age for nostalgia by the boomers and their echo generation.
It drives these highly delayed sequels, just as it drove the Star Wars prequels. It drives high prices for certain used cars and musical instruments, all of which represent nostalgia for a generation that has retired with disposable income. It drives outrageous ticket prices for aging rockers reliving 30 year-old hits.
It's demographics. When this wealthy generation dies off, the interest in its nostalgia will fade.
Boomers? I'm only in my 40s and have a whole lot of 80s and 90s nostalgia that Hollywood is milking the F out of. I'm hoping I won't die any time soon. Tom Cruise and Ed Harris are just the stars of some of my favorite movies from when I was a kid. Jennifer Connelly one of my first crushes. Not sure Top Gun is just targeting boomers.
[EDIT for clarity:] The boomers are a populous generation, and their children the millennials are also populous in a sort of "echo". It makes sense, that lots of parents would have had lots of kids. X are a less populous generation sandwiched in between those other two.
Boomers somehow gave birth to two generations- you had some still getting married and having kids right out of high school (kids would be Gen X) but you also had the 'Me Generation'/Studio 54/Gordon Gecko half who put off kids for career/lifestyle or spread them out over multiple marriages. I have a coworker who is 22 years younger than me despite our parents' ages being about two years apart. He's barely a millennial, while my childhood was pretty much as documented in 'Stranger Things'.
I ditched somewhere around S3. It wasn't like Ready Player One, where I felt ... milked ... but it was close to it. Gen X, mostly ignored, is still cynical enough to know when someone is trying to play them, and that's alright.
Don't get me wrong, some utility exists in the selection of earlier settings, namely not having cell phones, so I am sympathetic to that from the needs of the writers, but it would be nice not to have this stuff laid on with a trowel.
Prolific actors tend to also own their own production companies. Adam Sandler and Tom Cruise both own the production companies for their movies, which means they can have basically any role they want. Adam Sandler stars in dopey comedies set in on tropical islands with all of the same people because he likes getting paid to hang out with his friends in nice places.
Also, I think we can't discount how amazing plastic surgery is anymore. We don't see "old" actors hardy ever anymore. Even in the 90s, balding actors were pretty common, now you never see them. TC looks 35; same with Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd, etc. Why go with someone new when Brad Pitt looks just as young, but is a known quantity?