The Decline of the Movie Star, Revisited

Way back in 2012 (which feels like both yesterday and an eon ago to me) I wrote a piece about what seemed the declining relevance of Oscar night. In the course of that piece I had something to say about what was already becoming a fashionable topic, the decline of the movie star.

All these years later it seems to me that the talk about the decline of the movie star was well-warranted, for exactly the reasons that many were raising then--the fragmentation of pop culture and the sharpening divisions among the audience, the ascent of franchises (and special effects) at the expense of actors, the social and cultural changes that have eliminated those niches that made actors into icons. Indeed, if anything all of this seems to me to have become a good deal more pronounced in those years, with this reinforced in particular by the changes in how we get our movies, reinforced by the pandemic. Less and less do we see them in the theater, which I think had its element of mystique--and more and more do we see them privately on smaller screens, and indeed via streaming services that have done as much as anything else to divide our attentions. Exemplary of this is how the funding of for-streaming content years ago got to the point at which really big movies with A-list cast and crew regularly get made and released ($150 million, $200 million, $300 million movies directed by the likes of Michael Bay and starring people like Ryan Reynolds), with many of us scarcely noticing they were there, let alone their "entering the zeitgeist."

Of course, the streaming services have been cutting back on their funding of "content" for a while now--indeed, in the case of WBD's Batgirl they have gone to extreme lengths to cut anticipated losses on what seem to them unpromising projects--but I do not see the landscape wholly reverting to its earlier condition, all as the decline of the theatrical experience seems likely to continue regardless as studios find their longtime formula for getting people to the theaters failing, and show every sign of incapacity of finding a new one. The result is that at this point I see just about no chance of the film star making a comeback as a pop cultural institution, however much some seem to yearn for its return.