Quick. Name five movie stars under 30. I bet you can’t. I can’t either.

For several years now, I’ve felt Hollywood has a movie star problem: They just don’t make them any more. Outside of Zendaya and Timothee Chalamet, the industry hasn’t been cranking out megawatt, bona fide stars the way it did in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Where are the new Julia Robertses? The new Denzels? The new Tom Cruises? 

I am not the only one to ask this question. And many people smarter than me have claimed to know why: It’s because people go to the movies less than they used to (though digital audiences remain robust). It’s because the internet and social media have changed our relationship to stars, and made them more accessible than ever, which also makes them less special. It’s because social media and YouTube are competing with movies more than ever before. It’s because we don’t have a monoculture anymore. 

Whether or not all or any of these reasons are valid, we’re left with a cultural conundrum when the movie star as we know it has died. We have one less plank of pop culture to unite us, to give us some sense of shared identity, to bond over. I know, I sound a bit dramatic right now, but I mean it. 

This week, I brought on two film buffs to talk all of this over. Amy Nicholson is the film critic for the Los Angeles Times. And Paul Scheer is an actor and comedian who you’ve seen in too many projects to name here. Together, they host the Unspooled podcast, a show all about film. 

Amy and Paul agree with me that the era of the larger-than-life movie star may be over, but they differ in opinion on when and how it all started. For Amy, all roads lead to Oprah, and her couch. Do you remember when Tom Cruise was out promoting his film War of the Worlds? While also promoting his new relationship with Katie Holmes? During this massive press tour, he ended up STANDING on Oprah’s couch, on national TV. 

“Tom Cruise doing what we're just saying movie stars shouldn't do,” Amy says. “He is going on a television show, and he's getting beamed into people's houses. He's diminishing himself inside, [and that] really is and when he became a joke in that moment, suddenly the spell broke. And I think that was the end of the movie [star].” For Amy, the cardinal rule of a certified movie star is that they never gave you too much, outside of a film. And here, in this moment, Tom gave us all waaaaay too much. He broke the barrier, and changed our relationship to movie stars forever.

Paul, on the other hand, traces it all back to when TV went on-demand. When Netflix introduced binge culture to viewing, effectively trumping “appointment viewing.” When, all of a sudden, viewers could watch anything they wanted, whenever they wanted, for as little or as much time as they pleased. “When we became the controllers of our own entertainment,” said Scheer, “It's like, Well … why would I leave my house to go see Will Smith save the world?”

However we got here, we are here. And I kinda hate it here? A pop culture without certified movie stars is a pop culture that I think is definitively worse than a pop culture that has bona fide movie stars. And so how do we get it back?

My take: We should turn music stars into movie stars. We’ve already seen SZA take part in a box office topping buddy comedy earlier this year with One Of Them Days. And I wager that mega-stars like Kendrick Lamar and Post Malone would actually be super fun to watch on screen. We live in a culture that still supports music superstardom. Why not just port that over to the big screen? Hell, put Drake in a movie for all I care. It might make us all like him again. And lest we forget, he actually knows how to act. 

Check out this week’s episode to hear Paul and Amy’s ideas for resurrecting the movie star. And in the meantime, I wanna hear from you: Who, in your opinion, is the last real movie star? And what might it take to bring back movie superstar culture? Lemme know!

In the meantime, go watch a Julia Roberts film and reminisce on the good old days. They really don’t make ‘em like they used to… 

Chat next week! 

– Sam

Check out the latest episodes of The Sam Sanders Show here. 

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