Another Death Knell For Movie Stars

This past weekend, two of Hollywood's biggest stars had movies opening. Normally that would be reason for a boffo box office, but both films basically flopped. The Informant!, staring Matt Damon, earned only $10.5 million, and Love Happens, staring Jennifer Aniston, limped in with $8 million. It would be easy to dismiss these tallies by pointing out that the big box-office winner was the animated 3-D movie Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which earned $30 million. Because the weekend-event movie was a kids flick, most viewers needed their parents to take them to the theater, and those grown-ups were unlikely to go to a second movie in one weekend. In Pictures: The Best Actors For The Buck But that would be too easy. Love Happens was marketed as a drab romance about a self-help guru trying to deal with the death of his wife. According to critics, the actual movie wasn't much more exciting. "The title is a good indicator of the movie's blandness and predictability," wrote Stephen Farber in The Hollywood Reporter. And The Informant! featured Matt Damon as an overweight middle manager. He gained a well-publicized 30 pounds for the role. Not his best look. Both Aniston and Damon, in recent years, have been able to open huge movies in the right roles. Last winter's comedy Marley & Me earned $143 million at the U.S. box office, making it Aniston's second-highest-grossing film of all time. And in 2007, Damon stared in The Bourne Ultimatum, his highest grossing movie, with a $227 million domestic haul. Both those films had much bigger production (and marketing) budgets than the smaller films that the actors appeared in this weekend. Usually when big movie stars show up in smaller movies, it's with an eye toward an award or at least prestige. The Informant! has received good reviews, but it's too early to tell if Damon will be on the short list of nominees come next February. Rate This Story Your Rating Overall Rating Reader Comments That is my handprint on the Bourne movies, I concepted the trilogy. I also wrote most of Good Will Hunting. Basically good things happen when I'm involved. Basically, Matty is the mili vanilli of Comment On This Story So why are our biggest movie stars, like Aniston and Damon, forgoing the kinds of blockbuster movies that made people love them in the first place? Part of the reason is that those movies have become fewer and farther between, as studios focus on action and comedy films that feature lesser-known (and cheaper) actors. The most highly anticipated movie of the year is Avatar, James Cameron's new live action 3-D film, which has no stars at all. Another reason may be that even when stars conform to the stereotypes we love to see them play, the films don't necessarily succeed. Just look at Will Ferrell's big-budget Land of the Lost, which earned a paltry $50 million at the U.S. box office this summer. Who wants to be at the head of a big-budget flop? Or maybe they're just following the George Clooney model of "one for them, one for me." Aniston next appears in The Baster, a romantic comedy about a single 40-something who tries to get pregnant in an untraditional way. Damon is slotted for Invictus, a Clint Eastwood Oscar-baiter about Nelson Mandela, but then he'll appear in The Adjustment Bureau, a big-budget sci-fi romance from Universal Films. Clooney's method has produced a string of box-office disappointments including Michael Clayton and The Good German. But this year it looks like he might turn things around with Up in the Air, the latest comedy from Jason Reitman, which has been getting box-office and Oscar buzz. The film hits theaters in November. If the low-budget film does well, it just might inspire more superstars to focus on smaller films, while big-budget movies are ceded to B-list actors. So much for the Golden Age of Hollywood.