'Anyone But You' Offers The Solution For Hollywood's Movie Star Problem

The leggy Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney-starring rom-com should remind the industry that movie stars were built on more than just action fantasy franchises

No, Anyone But You did not “save” the theatrical romantic comedy, even as it topped the daily box office for the first time on Monday. In the pre-Covid years, audiences showed up to The Big Sick (still a rare Sundance pick-up to pass $40 million domestic), Crazy Rich Asians ($239 million worldwide), Last Christmas ($123 million worldwide on a $25 million budget), What Men Want ($54 million domestic on a $20 million budget), Yesterday ($154 million global on a $25 million budget). There is side-eye that this “nothing but the rom-com tropes” flick featuring young white alleged movie stars (Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney) being heralded as a genre savior over vehicles for Kumail Nanjiani, Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Taraji P. Henson and Himesh Patel. Nonetheless, the Sony release is still a “damn good news for the industry” word-of-mouth hit.  

The $25 million, Will Gluck-directed, R-rated film became the first 2,000-plus screen opener to earn more in weekend three ($9.7 million) than it did in its weekend two ($8.7 million) which was more than its opening weekend ($6 million). Scream pulled this off in 1996 from the same late-December weekend but debuted in 1,434 theaters. Scream amazingly never topped 2,000 screens as it legged out to $103 million from a $6.2 million launch. With $45 million domestic and counting, Anyone But You is going to be one of those mid-December programmers that earns more than 10x its respective Fri-Sun debut. Credit parents finally getting around to hiring a sitter and/or TikTok-active teens and college kids “discovering” the R-rated theatrical rom-com, the success story still offers an invaluable lesson – Let your new movie stars be movie stars and not just action/franchise stars. 

Trying to find the next Tom Cruise but only casting them in Legend 

It's no secret Hollywood spent 15-20 years trying to turn every somewhat handsome white guy into the next Tom Cruise. I’ve often argued that Hollywood spent decades looking for the next Tom Cruise instead of the next Will Smith. Moreover, perhaps spurred by the success of X-Men breakout Hugh Jackman, they kept casting performers like Taylor Kitsch, Armie Hammer and Charlie Hunnam in big-budget, assembly-line, often personality-free franchise films like Battleship, The Lone Ranger and King Arthur and the Legend of the Sword. Tom Cruise became a star not from Top Gun but from the coming-of-age sex romp Risky Business. If Hollywood kept trying to cast Tom Cruise in variations on Ridley Scott’s Legend ($25 million global in 1985 on a $24 million budget), he would never have become the butts-in-seats draw who could turn Rain Man, Jerry Maguire and Vanilla Sky into hits.  

Will Smith spent 2002 to 2012 as essentially the biggest star in the world, mostly because he pulled relatively strong global earnings from both fantasy/franchise flicks like I, Robot and "just a movie” programmers like Hitch and The Pursuit of Happyness. Likewise, Kevin Costner got audiences into Oliver Stone’s JFK ($205 million in 1991). Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves ($351 million in 1991) was among the few post-Batman superhero movies to become a blockbuster in the 1990s, and it still earned less globally than the Whitney Houston-starring The Bodyguard ($424 million, a near-record for an R-rated movie in 1992) and the Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves ($424 million in 1990). Not every Costner drama was a hit. RIP A Perfect World. However, movie stardom was (at worst) about Waterworld *and* Tin Cup. It wasn’t merely The Postman or bust. 

Patrick Swayze became an icon not from his action movies (Road House, Point Break and Next of Kin), but rather because of Dirty Dancing ($214 million on a $5 million budget in 1987) and Ghost ($517 million on a $22 million budget in 1990). Many of yesterday’s stars, think Denzel Washington and Leonardo DiCaprio, were heartthrobs before they were all-purpose draws. Today’s performers get far fewer studio-level opportunities to be movie stars in comedies, dramas, thrillers and/or romantic melodramas. There’s an entire generation of (mostly white) actresses (Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd, Whoopi Goldberg, etc.) who became bankable draws because Hollywood produced romantic comedies, melodramas, thrillers and farces. Margot Robbie can now make either year-end prestige flops like Babylon or full-on IP flicks like Barbie. Just nine years later, even her R-rated Will Smith-starring romantic thriller Focus feels like a relic. 

Movie stardom = headlining too-expensive installments of past-their-prime IP

The young (mostly white) men declared the next big thing are expected to anchor mega-budget franchise flicks. First, these films are often absurdly expensive. Tom Cruise’s Top Gun and Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop each cost around $15 million, meaning they didn’t have to top $300 million worldwide just to break even. A big-budget film in the 1980s – think Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Batman – cost $30-$50 million, not $130-$250 million. Second, the Hollywood franchise machine often drains the actors of their very movie star charisma. Liam Hemsworth is charming as hell in The Dressmaker but duller than dishwater in Independence Day: Resurgence. Jai Courtney is 4,000x more charismatic on Spartacus or as a bad guy in Jack Reacher than he was in Terminator: Genisys. Garret Hedlund is good in almost everything except Tron: Legacy and Pan.  

Henry Golding broke out as a fireball of sexual charisma in Crazy Rich Asians, A Simple Favor and The Gentleman. His reward was starring in a “nobody asked for this” G.I. Joe origin story focused on Snake Eyes. One “No, Joe!” bomb later, and he’s making The Assassins Club for VOD with no more “next James Bond” chatter. Yes, minority stars (like Star Wars breakout John Boyega, who was one-and-done after Pacific Rim: Uprising) can get disproportionately penalized for headlining failed franchise flicks. Anthony Ramos broke out in In the Heights and then headlined the eighth Transformers film long after the franchise stopped being important. Here’s a not-fun question: If Twisters bombs this summer (let's hope it doesn’t), will Powell be affected in terms of perceived bankability as much as Ramos or co-star (and fellow next-big-thing and Where the Crawdads Sing star) Daisy-Edgar Jones? 

It’s almost miraculous that the Euphoria breakout and the Top Gun: Maverick scene-stealer got to cash in their alleged stardom with a movie like Anyone But You. It’s a lower-budgeted, adult-skewing rom-com that relishes – rather than represses their star charisma and sex appeal. It’s filled with nudity, has no franchise aspirations, and is cheap enough to be a hit at $60 million and counting worldwide. It’s a star vehicle harkening back to when thespians, not IP or marquee characters, were franchises. Does Hollywood want to rebuild their movie star bullpen? Top Gun 2 was implicitly about Tinseltown's generational failure to do so. Try making more theatrical star vehicles that are varied (in terms of size, scale and genre), star-focused and cheap enough to succeed on a smaller scale. Give these alleged next-big-things something between an indie gem and playing Willy Wonka.