Why you can’t have two big movie stars in the same film, and the fall of star power

Last month, I took a look back at the film of Michael Crichton’s novel, Disclosure. It’s comfortably, for me, the most dated movie of the 1990s, and it’s an oddity of a movie, for a few different reasons.

But the one thought I couldn’t get out of my head when writing it is that this was the last time I can remember when two major movie stars joined together in the same film, and it still worked as a piece of entertainment. More to the point, it worked, and was still successful at the box office.

Since then, I’ve convinced myself to add Face/Off to the list, as both Cage and Travolta were riding very high at the time (Cage wasn’t quite at that level when The Rock was made). But that was still back in 1997. Runaway Bride would be an exception, too, were it not for the fact that the movie is genuinely quite terrible, and more concerned with what eggs Julia Roberts likes.

The only more recent project I can think of that comes close to qualifying is Doug Liman’s Mr & Mrs Smith, starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Yet were both really at the height of their movie star powers at that point, in the same way that Michael Douglas and Demi Moore were in Disclosure? I’m not sure they were, but I’m happy to count it as an exception, if it makes you happy.

Because there are enough candidates to prove the rule that two outright movie stars in one picture just doesn’t seem to work anymore. Three or more, as we’ll discover, is just dandy. And there’s no problem with one. It’s just two appears to be the poisonous number.

Examples, then.

Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt in The Mexican. Gore Verbinski’s movie wasn’t put together as an outright blockbuster, but the major star power behind it transformed the project. Not at the box office, though. Had the leading name being just one or the other, I do wonder if it would have done more than $147m worldwide it brought in (not a shabby number, certainly, but around half what could have been expected).

Talking of Julia Roberts, the pairing of her with Mel Gibson in Richard Donner’s underrated-but-muddled Conspiracy Theory was earmarked as a massive hit. The movie has problems, certainly, but enough to justify the $136m worldwide box office take? The same, you could argue, for Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks in this year’s Larry Crowne. Now granted, this was another project that was never an outright blockbuster, but even so, its worldwide box office take is just $52m. For two big stars of such pulling power, that’s best described as ‘modest’.

Another more recent example is The Tourist, a crappy US remake that starred Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. This should have been a fun movie, where you got to see two bona fide movie stars at work. It wasn’t. Critics hated it, and in the US, it could only rustle up $67m of business. For a Depp and Jolie vehicle. This was a project, though, where star power came in handy, as it did stellar business outside of America, to bring its total up to $278m.

Let’s also chuck into the mix, as they’re just bubbling under, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal in Father’s Day, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in Knight And Day, Harrison Ford and a then-hot Josh Hartnett in Hollywood Homicide, and Harrison Ford and a then-fast-generating-heat Brad Pitt in The Devil’s Own. I suspect you can think of more.

When packaging a movie together, it must look like a dream on paper. Two stars, one film. What could go wrong there? Turns out, quite a lot.

So why is that?

Firstly, movie stars are expensive. That’s the obvious answer. Films can generally only afford one, unless they’re working for scale. And working for scale is the exception rather than the rule.

Furthermore, a star is expected to drive the project to an extent. Rob Lowe makes the point in his excellent autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, that movie stars often get criticised for throwing their weight around, and for diva-like behaviour. But often, they’re the only ones with the power to do so. They’re the only people on a set with the power to force a creative decision on a studio, and also to resist a change to the project. When they do so, Lowe argues, it’s often unfairly spun that it’s a case of ego, when actually, it’s a case of quality.

But can that happen with two stars, sharing equal weighting? I’m not utterly sure that it’s practical.

Then, there’s the issue that two leading stars on two leading star salaries are going to require a generous amount of screen time. It’s not always possible to split a story to accommodate that, and often, fitting two stars in with similar gravitas just doesn’t comfortably work.

Oddly, this all tends to work with three or more stars, as an ensemble generally takes the pressure of one person to deliver. By nature, an ensemble can be a more relaxed place to be for a big star, who for once, isn’t carrying quite the same load on their shoulders.

There is also the argument, of course, that star power in general is on the wane. Looking through the top 20 movies at the box office this year, and it’s only really Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides that looks to have got to where it is out of sizeable star strength (Johnny Depp, in his most commercially popular role, although you can argue he added to Rango’s popularity, too). The rest of the top 20 is made up of franchises or ensembles, with barely an old-style movie star in sight.

Go back to 2010, and it’s Johnny Depp again, with his face a major part of the promotion for Alice In Wonderland. Twilight was sold on a trio of names, as well as a franchise, while Inception may have had Leonardo DiCaprio’s name all over the posters, but I’m not convinced that’s why people saw it. The only other project in the 2010 top twenty that appeared to have been fuelled by star power was Adam Sandler’s Grown Ups, which was an ensemble, but with Sandler very much at the head of it.

2009’s top twenty? Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side and The Proposal, and Liam Neeson in Taken, perhaps. 2008, meanwhile, saw Will Smith power Hancock to mega money, while Clint Eastwood was clearly the face of Gran Torino (and then there’s Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones).

The trend is clear, though: movie stars aren’t that important to big movies any more. It’s franchises and computers that are offering studios a better return on their investment. And computer effects don’t demand a share of the gross.

So perhaps the argument has moved on. For the past decade or so, putting two movie stars side by side in a movie has struggled to work. Now, it’s tricky to do it with even one, and there’s just the safety in numbers of the larger ensemble that’s where some star power still resides.

Is it a good thing? It certainly works in Hollywood’s favour, in terms of reducing costs, and it’s also seeing strong actors in big projects. In that sense, yes. But it’d be a pity to lost stars altogether, not least for the reasons that Rob Lowe mentioned.

Not for the first time, it seems that the movies have a habit of moving from one extreme to the other...

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