With diminishing returns and a lack of interest from big-screen audiences, are old-school action heroes heading to the retirement home…?
In the 1980s and 1990s, you couldn’t move for action heroes. Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger led a musclebound movement that led to younger, more grounded heroes like Will Smith, Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise in the 90s. All the while, a mega movie star like Harrison Ford could flit between genres but always seemed most at home playing a rugged hero and the same can be said of Bruce Willis.
Times change and trends change and as many of these heroes got older they were able to ride a wave of rose-tinted nostalgia by revisiting old franchises, or in the case of The Expendables, launching an entirely new one which looked to tap into an audience of made up of Late Boomers, Gen X and early millennials/Gen Y. The old favourites you grew up watching (whether yourself or vicariously through a parent) were returning and taking out bad guys in almost the same trend as the 80s, just with a lot more CGI blood and squibs.
In the early 00s, we also had a growing trend which saw actors advancing in years, suddenly becoming legitimate action heroes such as Liam Neeson and Denzel Washington (whose early career did include a few not-so-successful attempts). Oddly, though Liam Neeson hit the Taken franchise as a man in his mid 50s, younger audiences seemed to be hooked on it, as well as a run of high-concept potboiler thrillers like The Unknown, Non-Stop and more. In fact, this trend was so prominent that outside of Marvel and DC, most of the on-screen action heroes were men well into their 50s, all the way up to the continuing exploits of Sly Stallone in his 70s and Harrison Ford scraping up to 80.
In the last few years though, times seem to be changing. Movie stars don’t have the same lure they once did for one thing, with concept now king. Even pulling out a recurring appearance as your big franchise character of yesteryear doesn’t always translate to box office receipts. Just ask Arnold Schwarzenegger how well the Terminator franchise has done in the past decade, or Stallone about how well his last Rambo film did. These old boys turned up but there was no new audience willing to show up and they were unceremoniously abandoned by the audiences they’d previously relied on.
You might get a boomer out to see something with historic significance like Oppenheimer in a bi-annual cinema trip but you’re not going to have them turn up to watch the action heroes they flag waved in the Reagan hero. And there’s a further problem too: Cinemas are struggling to attract audiences. Sure, every now and again a phenom like Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar 2 or Barbenheimer comes along to prop up the entire flagging industry, but the lure the big screen had in the era of Jurassic Park seems to have gone.
Events have largely been replaced by content, older Gen Z audiences account for a big chunk of footfall along with younger millennials but perhaps we’re now seeing swathes of the under-21s abandoning the big screen and cinema in general to focus on short-form content (something Marty Scorsese worries about for the future). Those over 30 may be becoming frustrated by a lack of diverse and interesting choices. You could also probably point to a lack of emphasis on studios to make sensibly budgeted but engaging cinema in favour of bloated mega-budget films, many of which are boring people and for a host of reasons so many films from DC, MCU et al look cheap despite hundreds of millions spent on them.
For me, at 42 I’m also at a stage of awareness where something doesn’t feel right about many of the films aimed at me. Like films aimed at every demographic, occasionally with cynically minded cheap attempts to appease us, it becomes pretty obvious when a film has the dabs of a marketing team on it and a very lackadaisical attempt to lure me to the cinema. Case in point might be the disastrous Expend4bles which has once again been billed marketed purely on having old-school action heroes and being a Hard R. These aren’t and shouldn’t be a film’s entire selling point. Even more cynical is throwing Megan Fox awkwardly into a film she doesn’t fit, in the hope of attracting some viewers who don’t groan when they bend down to tie their laces.
Studios these days seem so unsure of what they want their film to be or who they want to attract to see it. Ultimately Expend4bles was a film very few wanted (I was probably one of about five people who was up for seeing another) and studios as they seem to across the board, really seem to undervalue quality as a selling point. A film that is suggested to be the most expensive of the franchise somehow ended up looking by far the cheapest and effectively gave it the sheen of a straight-to-streaming film rather than a big-screen film. Most of the cast are all flirting with or firmly in that straight-to-streaming arena anyway.
For Harrison Ford, his triumphant return as the star attraction proved to be a damp squib. Ford, always engaging, always magnetic to watch deserved a film that didn’t persistently look awkwardly fake with a mix of greenscreen and poor compositing. Meanwhile, the much-maligned Phoebe Waller-Bridge wasn’t nearly the death knell many expected, but it still felt as if her character was a haphazard attempt at engaging both a younger audience and female audience (failing on both fronts).
Denzel Washington might have managed to almost hold par with his third instalment of the popular Equalizer franchise but it’s still a diminished return. Though his appeal as a big-screen action hero has certainly held up better than Liam Neeson whose constant stream of toothless action thrillers with interchangeable posters, seems to confirm that if he’s to continue punching people it should be as a straight-to-video specialist.
Even the mighty Tom Cruise, still fresh off the mega success of Maverick, suffered an unfortunate misstep with the latest Mission: Impossible film. It may be down to bad luck, opening a week prior to Barbenheimer but Cruise will be hoping his appeal as Ethan Hunt hasn’t waned. Thankfully for the internet’s most loved icon, Keanu Reeves, he still continues to hold plenty of appeal as John Wick, but for how long? Unfortunately, outside of John Wick, audiences aren’t quite so quick to rush to a Reeves cinema spectacular (as we saw with The Matrix Resurrection). It’s a long way off DTV island for Cruise but Keanu Reeves has already had a run of genre films bypass theatres entirely.
Here in lies another problem though. The straight-to-video arena used to be a thriving landscape when VHS and early-era DVD rentals and sales could make a film a few dozen million in the US alone. Any kind of named talent would prove appealing and action stars of yesteryear like Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal and Dolph Lundgren would also pull in millions upon millions around the world on the rental and sales of physical media.
Streaming is far harder to quantify, and far less lucrative for producers, and the pool of who are considered bankable names has shrunk hugely. It’s a very small pool that continues to get smaller. Mel Gibson has replaced Bruce Willis as a prolific headliner but the interest even on that platform seems to be falling off and if indie producers can’t rationalise paying a huge fee for their poster name(s) in the near future we might see far less prolific outputs. Hell, Eric Roberts may drop from 120 films a year to about 75. This once-reliable fallback isn’t quite so sure now.
Audience tastes have changed and it feels like the 18-35 age groups are the most significant demographics that studios are looking to attract, to be the big and small screen. Increasingly they’re being drawn to protagonists within their generation rather than an older generation. At least when it comes to particular genres. Looking at Sly’s relative success with Tulsa King compared to Schwarzenegger’s tired nostalgia snoozer Fubar , it might be more beneficial for some of these older icons to go for slightly grittier, mature material.
Horror is booming once more, largely due to an ability to make films more cheaply and based more on the concept than who might be starring in it (and this also rings true in the DTV market). Ultimately though, could studios try and make better films to attract audiences? Let us know what you think on our social channels @FlickeringMyth or reach out to me on Instagram here…
