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Movie stars have been on a journey this fall, and it hasn’t been especially big, bold or beautiful. Actually, on second thought, maybe there is something bold about the way audiences have rejected, in quick succession, new movies collectively starring Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Channing Tatum, Kristen Dunst, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Keanu Reeves, Seth Rogen and none other than Daniel Day-Lewis. This group of actors that would constitute an especially star-studded Oscars broadcast couldn’t muster a single hit among them. Even Leonardo DiCaprio must accept his status as the exception that proves the rule: his movie One Battle After Another is heading toward a respectable $200m worldwide – and all it took was one of the biggest stars in the world with support from familiar faces Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro, a multiple-time Oscar nominee directing with an Imax-sized budget, and almost universally rapturous reviews. Put all that together in an adult-driven drama and maybe you can outgross, and lose somewhat less money than, Disney’s Snow White remake. (One Battle is unlikely to turn a profit on its theatrical release.)
Meanwhile, movies such as A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, The Smashing Machine, Roofman, After the Hunt, Good Fortune, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Anemone had no such constellation of exciting elements forming in their orbit alongside their stars. Some of them couldn’t even manage particularly great reviews. But that used to be what movie stars were there to provide: some kind of baseline level of interest in a movie, even if it wasn’t getting best-of-year reviews or boasting cutting-edge spectacle. None of the aforementioned stars are expected to perform with the superhuman consistency of Tom Cruise between 1986 and 2006 or Will Smith between 1996 and 2016. But there used to be a certain number of dramas and comedies that would make $50m or more in the US every year as a matter of course, the ones with stars tending to have an advantage in that respect.
It’s not breaking news that franchise brand names have largely replaced stars in terms of ticket sales. But it is notable that in 2025, Warner Bros in particular has shown that not every smash has to be a presold sequel or a reboot, with original, non-IP successes including Sinners, Weapons, F1 and the aforementioned (if less wildly profitable) One Battle After Another. Between that and the increasingly fallible Disney empire, studios would be forgiven for assuming audiences might be willing to sample some more non-genre movies, and that stars might nudge them in that direction, just as DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Michael B Jordan presumably helped those Warner titles.
So far, that assumption would be completely wrong. It’s not so much that any of this autumn’s star-laden bombs are One Battle-level world-beaters that audiences have painfully shunned. (Many of the year’s best movies will have platform releases, giving audiences more time to eventually shun them.) It’s more that not a single one has connected in a meaningful or even minor way; nothing even close to the modest but successful fall-season financial runs of past non-classic titles such as Ticket to Paradise (Roberts, George Clooney), Hustlers (Lopez), or Night School (Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish). For that matter, any of these fall 2025 bombs probably would have been happy to match 2022’s disappointing Don’t Worry Darling, which nonetheless eked out close to $100m worldwide, presumably based in part on its gossipy star power.
Instead, it seems increasingly like everything has go right (great reviews, great trailers, online buzz, low competition) for even a modest audience to turn up for old-fashioned non-genre movies. This in turn creates a strange deflation effect where even those films that are able to become non-franchise events to certain segments of the population – One Battle After Another, Challengers, Poor Things, even something sillier like The Fall Guy – are not reaching the heights of genuine phenoms past. Some consider this a sign of audiences too savvy to run out and fork over hard-earned money just for a glimpse of their supposed betters, and there may be truth to that. Again, it is hard to make a case that anyone who skipped A Big Bold Beautiful Journey was doing a disservice to the art of cinema. (After Yang, a much better movie from the same director also starring Farrell, is available at home!)
Yet it is also not as if celebrity culture is dying a deserved death in the face of increased sophistication. Kids yearn for hard-to-attain careers as influencers or YouTubers rather than movie stars or singers, and plenty of podcasters trade in a cult of personality far scarier than the waning desire to watch Robbie for two hours because she has a nice smile. At their best, movie stars can guide viewers into stories or worlds that might not otherwise interest them; DiCaprio has been doing this for decades at this point. And if stars were truly no longer of any interest, streamers wouldn’t keep paying them to defect to various miniseries and imitations of their old movies.
Some stars, granted, tend to provide something more akin to advertised services, with clockwork consistency. A lot of those figures have had great luck on Netflix and the like, where, say, the Adam Sandler brand can be preserved (even, based on the surprisingly varied work he has done for the streamer, perfected). But some of the best aspects of these current flops involve getting a look at what a longtime performer finds interesting at this point in their career: Julia Roberts playing especially prickly as an imperious yet dissatisfied college professor in After the Hunt, or Reeves refining the comedy of his Bill & Ted days as a well-meaning but fumbling angel getting a taste of genuine humanity in Good Fortune. There are smaller, less starry movies that explore similarly rich characters, to be sure, but they are not playing on several thousand screens. These movies aren’t being rejected in favor of anything in particular, except maybe staying home.
Recently musing on social media about why these types of movies no longer seem to draw an audience, I received hundreds of responses, including many variations on the greater cost-effectiveness of waiting for streaming and plenty of irritable insistence that these particular movies all looked bad or uninspired, as if they were just an anomalous blip as everyone waited for better movies. (To that I say: some better movies called Splitsville, Twinless, and Black Bag came out earlier this year. You probably skipped those, too.) Potential moviegoers like to imagine themselves as egalitarian, smart, immune to the familiar and in search of novelty – and some of them are. But the truth is, it now requires an onslaught of inescapable hype to get people out to theaters in any kind of decent numbers, and being susceptible to hype is not necessarily the same thing as being a discerning viewer who only sees the good stuff. (There are also, of course, plenty of people who can’t afford constant nights out. This is not directed at them.) Liking a movie star enough to see them play a criminal hiding out in a Toys “R” Us store or an early MMA fighter in the 90s isn’t necessarily a badge of honor. It is, however, one more form of engagement with your personal tastes, like having an interest in horror movies or romantic comedies. No one is obligated to follow a big name wherever they go. Just be aware of what companies are happy to swap in for old-fashioned irrational devotion: an algorithm designed to keep you on the couch.
