This month, Brad Pitt scored his biggest ever box office hit. With today’s stars subject to more scrutiny than ever, could they repeat the same feat 30 years from now? This article was published in the Film Stories Newsletter on 15th August 2025. If you want similar witterings in your inbox every Friday, sign up ... Is the half-life of a movie star getting shorter?
This month, Brad Pitt scored his biggest ever box office hit. With today’s stars subject to more scrutiny than ever, could they repeat the same feat 30 years from now?
This article was published in the Film Stories Newsletter on 15th August 2025. If you want similar witterings in your inbox every Friday, sign up below:
F1 isn’t the most celebrated of Fight Club star Brad Pitt’s filmography. It might be an unsurprisingly corporate sports flick based on the world’s fastest-moving billboard. But it owes a large part of its success not just to Formula One (though its international popularity suggests that’s no small part of it), but to Pitt’s star power. 34 years after he hit the big time with Thelma & Louise, Pitt is still going strong in his role as one of the most famous actors on the planet.
He’s not bulletproof, of course. Damien Chazelle’s criminally underrated Babylon proved to be a project not even his golden locks could save from its fumbled Oscar campaign. AppleTV+’s Wolfs, after a very public falling out between studio and director, will be chalked up as just another broadly forgettable straight-to-streaming thriller on a service hardly short of them. Even serious, real world controversy doesn’t sink Pitt like it does his modern-day contemporaries.
We’ve all seen plenty of folks lauding Tom Cruise as the world’s last movie star – but I’d argue box office draw doth not a leading man make. More important is a whiff of celebrity, acting chops, and charisma that can de-shoe a horse. Of course this guy’s a movie star; he’s Brad f*cking Pitt.
Working to Mr Pitt’s advantage, of course, is that he earned his leading man stripes in the 90s, which is where Pedro Pascal went wrong, frankly. The Fantastic Four: First Steps star has been everywhere recently, from Marvel blockbusters to auteur-driven projects (The Materialists, Eddington) and one of the most talked-about TV moments of the year (The Last Of Us). That’s before you take into account the billboards, cuddly press junket clips and that Airpods advert he did with Spike Jonze.
In its own way, it’s surprising the backlash has taken this long to arrive. Maybe thanks to his all-encompassing and genuine nice-guy persona, as recently as a few months ago it was a real effort to find anyone with a bad word to say about ol’ Pedders. (Relatively speaking – this is the internet, which means you are never more than a single click away from someone slagging you off, but you get what I mean). Said backlash might be led by a few right-wing trolls upset that he sees trans people as human beings, but the grumblings are there. As Sydney Sweeney has found with the insane outrage from her dad-joke jeans advert, it doesn’t take much for grumblings to turn into an avalanche.
Barry Keoghan suffered a similar fate a few years ago. After stand-out turns in awards darling The Banshees Of Inisherin, Saltburn and a high-profile cameo in The Batman, it felt for a while like the young Dublin lad was popping up all over the place. It didn’t take long for an edge of resentment to seep into that observation and now, though he’s geeing up for a potentially career-defining performance in Sam Mendes’ Beatles biopic(s), he’s undoubtedly less present than he used to be: the only 2025 project on Keoghan’s IMDb page is The Weeknd album side-project Hurry Up Tomorrow (he also starred in Squarespace’s Superbowl ad this year, which shows how useful IMDb is).
It’s the same problem facing every part of the attention economy, from blockbuster marketing to politics. Where an old media world meant each individual act of promotion – a big magazine interview, a TV slot – went much further, our fragmented media landscape today means reaching the masses necessitates oversaturation. It’s the same ridiculous situation which turned Keir Starmer’s toolmaker dad into a meme during 2024’s general election campaign – if people aren’t sick of your message, you haven’t been saying it enough.
When it comes to celebs and movie stars, though, the issue becomes one of supply and demand. Keoghan’s career could have slowed down because audiences were sick of seeing him in underwear adverts. Equally, the actor could have decided he’s fed-up of appearing in underwear adverts. With the pressure to churn out work at a frenetic pace just to keep your name at the top of casting directors’ lists, the risk of burnout must be high – especially when so much of that output needs to be goofy adverts or vapid viral media clips to cut through. The opportunity for an actor to sculpt an image through careful selection of projects, as Pitt was able to do in the 90s (see his four-film run of Interview With The Vampire, Legends Of The Fall, Se7en and Twelve Monkeys across 1994/5) no longer exists.
Instead, the current state of movie stardom seems to be one Pedro Pascal, for one, is making the most of. With a career spanning two decades before his big break in Game Of Thrones, the Chilean-American actor must know all too well that stardom today is a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon. If you’re wondering why we don’t have movie stars anymore, it’s because the internet has made creating a sustainable, high-quality brand almost (cough, Timothée Chalamet) impossible. If we’re seeing Pedro everywhere now, it’s because he’s making the most of it. In 30 years’ time, will he be able to launch his career’s biggest hit? I can’t see how he could.
