The golden age of the aging actor
theringer.com
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Prolific actors tend to also own their own production companies. Adam Sandler and Tom Cruise both own the production companies for their movies, which means they can have basically any role they want. Adam Sandler stars in dopey comedies set in on tropical islands with all of the same people because he likes getting paid to hang out with his friends in nice places.
Also, I think we can't discount how amazing plastic surgery is anymore. We don't see "old" actors hardy ever anymore. Even in the 90s, balding actors were pretty common, now you never see them. TC looks 35; same with Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd, etc. Why go with someone new when Brad Pitt looks just as young, but is a known quantity?
With the hottest actresses, you can definitely notice he does casting.
Most of his movies are exactly the same with different dressing. I think Happy Gilmore was the prototype. Same plot, same type of girl, same jokes, different SNL buddies making an appearance.
But mainly I'd say Adam Sandler is a good actor when he's acting in things other people have written, and he's just having fun getting paid to hang out with friends in nice places when he's in movies he writes.
As long as he keeps switching off between good and dopey, I think he can run his con for a long time.
Con? Interesting word choice there.
Other than that I think you have to go a long way back for toned down 'dopey' though, before he hit that particular stride. Or maybe I was just younger and not so bothered by it - can't think of an example at the moment.
Think of Cheez Whiz... is it a fine artisan cheese? Hell, no. Is it tasty melty substance that makes a good cheesesteak or nacho? Absolutely!
I also assume the films have heavy digital editing to make them look younger.
Cruise taped a "thanks to coming to the theaters" thing that ran before Top Gun when I saw it, and it definitely looked about a decade older. Call it 50, while his character looked 40, and he's actually 60. I found it useful to calibrate my guess around how much was due to makeup and movie magic, and how much due to skincare and surgery.
I should add my favourite detail about the movie - during and after any pilots perform a manoeuvre, listen to their breathing.
Yeah I noticed this too. His speech was slower and forced (it seemed like he was having trouble breathing). The skin around his neck was tight in a way that you only see in more elderly folks.
The movie was nothing like this but in that tape it was just completely obvious he was a 60 year old dude. Nothing wrong with that of course you just don't normally see him looking like that and didn't even in the movie itself.
Both of these guys look very much like youthful middle aged men.
The Brimley/Cocoon line twitter account sort of shows this. Wilford Brimley was 50 when Cocoon came out in 1985 - I thought he was easily 70.
Some of these actors may have tanned, like Stallone, but many others were careful to not do that.
Source: I am 35
And then I specified exactly what about their face - which is a lack of a certain “bounce” seen in younger people’s faces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfKO9rYDmE8
Don't get me wrong, dude looks amazing for his age, but definitely not 35.
EDIT: And, though less frequently, I've seen similar things for other jobs in making filmed entertainment, with TV getting a lot more respect as a medium for storytelling.
Their production companies exist as a vehicle to get a piece of that pie and have more creative control.
You have a lot more professional options if you can pull off a younger character.
I could only wonder about the tiktok world but that is a step too far for me
https://www.distractify.com/p/minions-movie-tiktok-trend
It’s getting some credit for a ticket sale bump. I wonder if the joke for some kids isn’t just that the minions are lame but movies as a whole are lame?
And yes, it helped drive a better opening weekend than was normally projected.
But I digress. Altogether, I think it's good for the industry that kids are gathering at movie theaters again and doing things like this that make memories.
My kids are all on their phones watching tiktok and youtube. They were traumatized when a prominent YouTuber died this weekend of cancer.
Movies? They used to be into the MCU when it was relatively fresh, but now it's stale, like Harry Potter. My youngest went to see TopGun Maverick with me, but wanted to spend time with me more than seeing an old boomer movie retread.
It's an interesting thing because some games are much more narrative, and others are much more competition-oriented. The latter seem to be driving a lot of the current $$$$.
Youtube and social media exist in a new sort of advertising-dollar-pie-expanding competiting-but-also-newly-different genre of free content. And kids will eat that shit up since they aren't rolling in money for increasingly-expensive movies.
A lot of movie genres have basically just moved to cable and streaming. Funny that yesterday's "free" kids entertainment (cable, since parents were subscribed anyway) is today's paywalled streaming content.
Is Hollywood, by itself, threatened by Tiktok any more than it was by MTV? Between streaming and theatrical, Hollywood is doing great. The streaming bubble has to deflate some, though - it's been running at a loss for a decade - we'll see how big a hit that is.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
Even from 2004, when Brad Pitt was arguably less popular than in the 1990s, we can see that Tom Holland has never reached the same 'peaks' that Brad Pitt had reached. Tom Holland blew up in December 2021 (though never reaching two of Pitt's peaks), and is now down to a level of interest lower than Brad Pitt is today.
Similar for Zendaya vs. Jennifer Aniston: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
If we average out the 2021 popularity for Zendaya/Holland, and average out the 2004 popularity for Pitt/Aniston, then Pitt/Aniston dominate.
The data is slightly tangential, and so it's not conclusive, but it basically suggests that you're mistaken.
There's a reason Bruce Springsteen is huge, and it isn't because he can sing.
I'm not aware of him doing any social media influencing - he had earned his reputation long before social media.
And it wasn't just album sales. At the time it was also constantly on radio and MTV (back when MTV played music).
His Broadway show (currently on Netflix) is deeply inciteful and demonstrative of his path, and his skill as an entertainer.
It's harder to break out now with everyone one and their friend having a youtube channel, but don't underestimate the amount of work it took for Bruce to breakout in the early 70s. It was ever thus for entertainers, thousands aspire and only a very few make it.
2) The traditional record company system pumped an ENORMOUS amount of money behind him to market him initially. So much so that he is embarassed about it to this day.
3) The E Street Band were some of the absolute best musicians around. The old joke about "Man, I don't know who Bruce Springsteen is, but he must be amazing. He has Clarence Clemons playing triangle in his band."
Has it ever been?
Another factor may be the skyrocketing costs of movie tickets. This source [2] shows that tickets went from $4.35 in 1996 to $9.16 in 2021, which exceeds the rate of inflation. Additionally, I'm not aware of any tickets to be had for $9. Tickets are exorbitantly expensive these days [3].
[1] https://www.mekkographics.com/american-moviegoers-by-age-and...
[2] https://247wallst.com/media/2021/03/29/this-is-the-price-of-...
[3] The price for one ticket to Jurassic World tonight at a theater near to me is $18.84. This is in "2D" on a standard screen.
So minus the pepsi, it is $31.09USD for 2 adults.
Even if I reached out to my admittedly few dozen facebook family from 16-90 year old and said I sorted all them out for $1 a film. No one would go. I mean maybe 1-2 people would go but even then I'd be mind blown.
That should actually explain it.
My wife and I used to see a movie or two every weekend. Then we had kids seven years ago. I think I've been to the theater maybe four times since then (and two of those were without my wife).
Implying gift/inheritance not theft. If I was a grandpa and had one in my shed, I'd probably give it to my grandkid that happens to be a top gun pilot/instructor.
Aka they film a movie when their 20, it’s a breakout hit when their 23, their next movie comes out when their 26.
So, that pushes the earliest summer release as 2 to 2.5 years after filming each scene assuming COVID actually delayed things.
You can see they had settled on June 2020 as the release date, but, you know what happened next. That release date was fully locked in until it became clear COVID wasn't going away.
There were other, earlier delays: the film was initially scheduled for 2019, but they spent most of that year doing reshoots.
But it’s clearly on this list from dec 2019: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/2020-movies-to-see-14004...
I mean, i guess it's kinda hard to film scenes not-in-chronological-order with a teenager who visibly changes during the filming, but it's not an impossible thing to do.
They are. Sure, there are some that are wildly out of that range, but since someone else raised BtVS let's look at how old the main cast was in 1997, when they were playing sophomores in high school:
- Sarah Michelle Gellar was 20
- Alyson Hannigan was 23
- Charisma Carpenter was 27
- Nicholas Brendan was 27
If you are under 18 there are all sorts of restrictions on hours worked, supervision, etc. So it is a lot easier to get a 18+ actor to play a 12-17 year old than someone the actual age.
Part of the reason child actors struggle to transition to adult roles. 3-4 year enforced gap in their career.
0. https://assets.mycast.io/characters/xander-harris-794251-nor...
Uh, except he wasn't perceived as scrawny, and was a jock-adjacent slacker, almost an anti-nerd.
Regardless it is remarkable or even more remarkable.
I looked her up, because my daughter was asking about her.
I'm surprised that works in 2022!
Daniel Radcliffe on the other hand was actually 11-12 when playing an 11-12 year old character. By comparison Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy simply didn’t fit nearly as well because he was a 2 years older. https://fantasytopics.com/harry-potter-cast-real-life-ages-d...
Its my gripe with the latest Dune adaptation. No way that actress was old enough to be Paul's mom unless she had him when she was 6 years old. She looked more like his siter than his mother.
It bugs me when they don't have age apropriate family members with such obviously wide age gaps.
The real kicker is that Paul probably should have looked younger. In the novel, he arrives on Arrakis when he is 15.
Never met 40+ woman who looked as if she just finished university? Smooth skin, no moles or wrinkles, energetic. Genes + upkeep + generally healthy lifestyle + good sleep. And probably no kids.
Its not outrageous to have 15 year old son and looking very fine, plenty of world even in 2022 start having kids before/at 20. Look at all the photos of young moms from Ukraine escaping, often almost teenagers around young mom, in age that here where I live local women start thinking about having a child.
Jessica Atreides at about 40 is supposed to look so extraordinarily youthful that a younger actress like Rebecca Ferguson is needed.
If you know anything about Dune's lore, you would know why this is the case. The movie absolutely does not go into enough detail about this or explain the abilities of Bene Gesserit.
In fact, I don't think it does it at all.
Jessica is a Bene Gesserit, they are explicitly noted to stay youthful in appearance and live a long time. This is one of many hundreds of details that just have to be shown, there's no time to explain them.
Bancroft was 36 at the time of release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Graduate
American Pie 1999. Jennifer Coolidge -> Eddie Thomas = 19.
Don Jon 2013. Julianne Moore -> Joseph Gordon-Levitt = 21.
Mother Lover 2009 SNL skit is a classic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0DeIqJm4vM. Patricia Clarkson -> Andy Samberg = 19. Susan Sarandon -> Justin Timberlake = 35.
The French Dispatch 2021. Frances McDormand -> Timothée Chalamet = 38.
Comare that to My Tutor 1983 where 8 year difference was still seen risque.
The article shows a graph of the age gap between leads, and it shows it slightly narrowing, while both men an women stars are getting older on average.
Add some time between when you actually see a movie and you see an actor in real live and they may have been 5+ years younger when it was actually filmed.
So, to compensate, actors tend to be a lot skinnier in real life. Like, 'yo, you need a cheeseburger' skinnier. My brother lived in LA for a number of years and would occasionally run into celebs. He said that when running into one he would first always say to himself 'Hey, that person looks a lot like a skinnier and shorter version of ___". And, lo, it would just be that actor, but without all the makeup and lighting and wardrobe.
Another example is the 1968 Romeo and Juliet, where the leads were kids. It's the only version of the story that really works. Both West Side Story and its remake had the "kids" way too old to be believably besotted with each other.
Stars who get their fame from a franchise tend to have a hard time selling tickets outside the franchise. (Harrison Ford being the exception of course.)
That said, Top Gun had some pretty incredible makeup and/or CGI for his face. The lighting in that movie was also phenomenal. The result was an almost uncanny valley look to him where he looked simultaneously old and young all at once. I was especially thrown off by the pre-movie screener he produced that thanked the audience for seeing the film in theatres. He looked a solid 5-10 years older in that screener compared to Top Gun, which was filmed mostly in 2019.
Some things you would expect, like don't mention Taiwan, or being critical of China. There's some weird stuff too, like no "time travel" and no "ghosts".
I wonder what a world where he won would look like?
So, what's the "danger" in the concept alone? I'm assuming they have a "rational" explanation behind the decision. What is it?
I think that excerpt from the article answers my question.
https://www.quora.com/In-The-Force-Awakens-poster-is-making-...
I’ve traveled extensively in China. From my own personal experience they are extremely racist. The difference is night and day, you cross the “border” at the airport and the ads all become incredibly pale.
Hong Kong and tier-1 China are basically everything you’d imagine in a white supremacists wet dream, but Asian.
They don’t possess any concept of white guilt, they have no cultural shame and are not susceptible to identity politics. They are “friendly supremacist”. They will smile in your face producing xxx,xxx,xxx widget per year while hating your guts.
According to this Quora post, it doesn't appear to be the case[0]
0. https://www.quora.com/Why-are-movies-about-time-travel-banne...
It’s not so much that time travel itself is banned, it’s that the Chinese government has a bunch of rules that make time travel movies impossible to execute.
For example, the Chinese government wishes to protect the dignity and honor of historical culture. And that means, any movie made of those time periods must fundamentally be serious.
Also, it’s possible that whoever is running the movie review board personally thinks time travel is “too silly”.
Why? Seems the market was plenty big enough prior to their ascendancy.
It was probably upvoted again (as happens a lot when people comment on downvotes) by the time you found the comment.
This is how we get movies like Skyscraper(2018)[0]. $120M budget. $70M from US/Canada. $300 from "worldwide" and most of that was from China. Just the Chinese opening weekend alone was $48M.
Transformers: Age of Extinction. $210M budget. China alone provided $300M of profit.
All you need to do is hire Chinese actors for side characters, set a bit of your movie in China and not talk about Taiwan. Easy money =)
Robert Downey Jr. $2.4B 5'9"
Tom Cruise $8B 5'1"
Tom Hanks $9B 6'
Dustin Hoffman $2.5B 5'6"
What his publicist says should be taken with a grain of salt.
China may be changing the "Summer Blockbuster" segment of the industry but it's quite the stretch to say they are destroying the whole thing. Plenty of great movies still come out every year.
There's plenty of argument that the Academy Awards aren't necessarily the best movies but even if you look at the movies represented this year, there were a lot of good ones and I don't think any of them were influenced by China. Obviously you can't prove it unless the filmmakers confirm it, but certainly there are a lot of movies with themes that would be unacceptable to Chinese censors.
Maybe the plot of "Transformers 7" isn't as good as it could have been without Chinese influence but as long as movies like "The Power of the Dog" (or "Licorice Pizza" or "Belfast" or "Flee" if animation is more up your alley or ... take your pick) are coming out, I'd say the industry is doing ok.
It's going to be very, very hard to have another Cruise, or Costner, or Johnson, etc., with the baggage literally every younger actor is carrying these days. It will take new faces, but again, who we know nothing about. Which is possible, how?
Tom Holland, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Zendaya, for example, are in their twenties, hugely popular, even among millenials, and probably they will be still popular in twenty years
Unless you mean something different by "squeaky" than what I think you do, then Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an example of a successful actor who fits that description, don't you agree?
Making the jump from "teen hearthrob" is hard; Depp made it but Richard Grieco and the whole cast of 90210 did not.
Beyond that a lot of it would be that society has changed in a manner that it's just very hard to have a movie star today that has the level of widespread fame that a Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt attained in the 90s.
You've also got a lot more actors who know how to handle their careers long enough to protect their status; there's a template the likes of Robert Redford built out by getting so involved in the overall process that still helps a lot.
It only grossed $5 million though, below its budget. Too bad, because the cast was amazing: also Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Jenna Fischer, Jesse Eisenberg, Mary-Louise Parker.
Haven't been able to watch Deniro since I saw him get all slobby drunk and try to talk during an award show in the 90s. Most of these people have proven themselves ridiculous, making it very hard to watch them in a movie...Tom Cruise especially.
"Only Murders in the Building" is awesome though.
Ok, well, that's weird, but you do you.
Millennials were born in the 1980s.
So, no. As usual, everyone forgets that GenX exists.
It used to be that Millennials were held responsible for killing everything. Now they're held responsible for saving everything?
These are bankable assets because everyone is familiar.
One reason might also be how consumption of media have changed. The same stuff isn't repeated as much on main delivery channels.
In times of economic turmoil, folks tend to prefer the safety of established (i.e. older) people.
Actors (and politicians) who became famous in the olden days are the last of their kind
It will be interesting to see what comes next
The action wasn't so violent, but the plot was good and the movie worth watching. Count me as a fan of older actors, when the vehicle is right.
If some kid wins, in 50 years time they'll be this statistic too, making "Planet of the Apes Next Gen, Episide XXXVI" pretending to be 25 years younger.
It's also the golden age of the aging politician. Biden? Trump? Sanders? Pelosi? Pence? Putin? They're all too old.
Ronald Reagan? Robert Byrd? Strom Thurmond?
Pence isn't that old.
It drives these highly delayed sequels, just as it drove the Star Wars prequels. It drives high prices for certain used cars and musical instruments, all of which represent nostalgia for a generation that has retired with disposable income. It drives outrageous ticket prices for aging rockers reliving 30 year-old hits.
It's demographics. When this wealthy generation dies off, the interest in its nostalgia will fade.
https://nerej.com/generation-y-also-known-as-millennial-or-e...
Sort of the negative space propagating up the demographic pyramid that slacked breifly and was never heard from again.
ST is generally awful and I was compelled to watch up to S3. I'd probably be watching S4 if I had the time. The thing is impressively optimized.
Don't get me wrong, some utility exists in the selection of earlier settings, namely not having cell phones, so I am sympathetic to that from the needs of the writers, but it would be nice not to have this stuff laid on with a trowel.
Ready Player One was a deliberately over the top nostalgia fest ... Ready Player Two was where I felt played/milked.
The angry scottish man likes it