Hollywood has often relied on its $20 million men - stars who can "open" films, immediately bringing in two or three times their prodigious salaries - to motivate moviegoers during the two bonanza weeks of Christmas and New Year's. This year will test their power to reach adults as well as children during Yuletide.
Many of the stars who usually play quarterback to commercial franchises have chosen to go deep and get serious. For example, we'll see Will Smith as an IRS agent with a guilty conscience in Seven Pounds. Tom Cruise, in Valkyrie, takes on the real-life heroism of Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the most famous plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Brad Pitt creates a character from a fantasy figure who is born an old man and de-ages as the years go by in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an adaptation of a little-known F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. And Leonardo DiCaprio delves into Mad Men territory with the long-awaited adaptation of Richard Yates' celebrated 1961 novel about a troubled 1950s marriage, Revolutionary Road, co-starring his Titanic true love, Kate Winslet, as his bride.
Add 007 Daniel Craig co-starring with Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell in Defiance, the tale of the Bielski brothers, Jewish resisters to Nazi conquest who established their own free village in Belarus, and you've got a lineup of Tinseltown's most intriguing, influential and, yes, bankable male stars lending their talents to productions that attempt to carry historical weight, moral earnestness and/or literary pedigrees with liveliness and grace.
This Christmas season's panoply of marquee-name art and entertainment includes other box-office draws in more predictable outings, such as Keanu Reeves in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston in Marley & Me, Jim Carrey in Yes Ma n and Samuel L. Jackson in The Spirit, while a slew of our most honored actors return in roles sure to win critical attention, such as Sean Penn as the United States' first openly gay elected public official, Harvey Milk, in Milk, and Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams as embattled clerics in Doubt.
This apparent glut caused Variety to headline its Hollywood preview story "Holiday Heartburn: Crush of star-driven Yule pics raises studio angst." As noted by the trade paper's reporter, Pamela McClintock, the Christmas period usually brings a swarm of releases on the specialty side, but in 2008, the major studios have doubled their typical output of lavishly promoted end-of-year releases.
