Kevin Costner is a big star. He dances with wolves, he fields his dreams, he plays Robin Hood in a California accent, and lines form outside the local plex that are longer than the queue of creditors at an S&L. Star quality: people want to watch him on the big screen. Star power: tens of millions of people will pay for the privilege. And keep on paying. His western smash, Dances with Wolves, has been filling theaters for nine months now. Last week more folks went to see it than Return to the Blue Lagoon, which was all of two weeks old.
But even Costner can suffer a total eclipse of the star. Last year Columbia Pictures sent him to Mexico, gave him a pretty woman and a passion to ride after and called the movie Revenge. For Columbia, the only revenge was Montezuma's: the picture went down the commode in a flash. It stumbled to a $15 million gross, less than a tenth of what Dances with Wolves or Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves will have earned in North American theatrical release.
Which proves the twin tenets that feed Hollywood's glory and gloom: 1) there is such a thing as star power; 2) there is no such thing as guaranteed star power.
This summer's films offer support for both truisms. The two megahits are from the two biggest stars: Costner's Robin Hood ($140 million so far) and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator 2: Judgment Day ($160 million). With City Slickers ($105 million), Billy Crystal has demonstrated that a comedian, savvily shaping projects to suit both him and a large audience, can share the spotlight with two cranky studs. But the season's major flop is Dying Young (a pitiful $32 million), from the former Miss Can't-Miss, Julia Roberts. "They said Julia Roberts could open any film," notes Martin Grove, industry analyst for the Hollywood Reporter, referring to a star's ability to lure sizable audiences on a movie's first weekend. "They said she could open a phone book. Dying Young proved they were wrong."
What Dying Young really proved is that you don't call a picture Dying Young. The last time they made this movie, a romance about a terminally ill cutie, they were smart enough to call it Love Story. Roberts' rapid ascendancy taught Hollywood that she could sell innocence, glamour, pluck. But not even the movies' most reliable female star since Doris Day could peddle leukemia -- particularly not to a summertime audience that wants only the bad guys to die. So Dying Young did just that, and Roberts' pristine rep got terminated too.
Her roller-coaster career curve is hardly unique. With the exception of a macho-arts maven like Steven Seagal, whose films routinely pick up an easy $40 million, nearly every modern star's box-office graph zigzags as wildly as an Axl Rose delta gram. Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood have dominated movies for a quarter-century, but their latest pictures have played in empty theaters. Robert De Niro, the most admired actor in films, went a decade after The Deer Hunter (1978) without a hit. Then he appeared in three commercial successes: GoodFellas, Awakenings, Backdraft. When Bruce Willis flexed his pecs through two Die Hard melodramas and gave voice to the Look Who's Talking hits, he had to be hot; each pair of films grossed close to $200 million. Then he fell off the table with The Bonfire of the Vanities, Mortal Thoughts and Hudson Hawk. Look who's flopping.