Hollywood Increases Star Power in Its Audience Search

“The stars are more important than ever,” said Creative Artists supervisor Bryan Lourd, who arranged the “Knives Out” deal. “When the stars encounter material with fastballs, it cuts out all the noise.”

There are other explanations for the dam. In a severely disrupted market, the stars seek security; As in “Nightmare Street”, no one can be held responsible for not reaching an audience. Movie marketing has also changed, becoming less about prime-time TV with commercials bombing the carpet and more about capitalizing on social media fan bases. Ms. Grande has 284 million Instagram followers. (Pity Mr. DiCaprio and Mr. Holland, with only 50 million parts.)

Founder Mr. Basinger Wesleyan University‘s film studies department noted that the power of individual stars was waning. Studios are fixated on intellectual property, namely pre-existing franchises and characters. As a result, there was less need to produce new stars and keep old ones hot; Iron Man, Dominic Toretto, Wonder Woman and Baby Yoda are now stars.

“In the old days, brands were movie stars,” he said. “They reached the whole audience. Not a slice of the audience. Everyone. But they all fell apart. Now, it’s about adding niches.”

In other words, the few stars that require Hollywood to stack the cast with an almost absurd number of celebrities remain credible in themselves. Water the area.

And don’t forget Hollywood’s favorite game: Follow the leader. “Avengers: Endgame” was one of the loudest, filling the cast with Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Chadwick Boseman, Jeremy Renner, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Olsen and a dozen daring names. The highest-grossing movies of all time in 2019. On a very different scale, 2017’s all-star remake of “Murder on the Orient Express” also broke box office records.

“It’s in vogue right now,” said producer and former studio marketing chief Tim Palen of what he calls the “all skating” approach to casting. “It’s not new, but there are certainly signs of the fierce battle for attention that continues.”