Can she open a movie?

[libertango]

A while back, someone made this post about whether George Clooney is really a movie star. The heart of their argument:

"There's one teensy-weensy problem, though, that nobody seems to have noticed. One tiny little thing missing from the George Clooney is the World's Biggest Movie Star storyline...nobody watches his movies."

Well... In that case, you have to wonder: Is Angelina Jolie a movie star?

Here are Jolie's numbers, from BoxOfficeMojo.com

Here are Clooney's.

Both have peak movies of $180-mumble million. Clooney has two -- Ocean's Eleven and The Perfect Storm. Jolie has one -- Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The problem? Well, as our poster says:

"(O)nly The Perfect Storm, released during the Clinton Administration, can truly be called “a George Clooney movie” in the way that, say, Forrest Gump is “a Tom Hanks movie” and virtually every Tom Cruise movie is, in fact, “a Tom Cruise movie”."

Mr. & Mrs. Smith is not "an Angelina Jolie movie." Mostly because (like Ocean's Eleven), it has Mr. Jolie, aka, Brad Pitt.

Jolie's highest solo movie is Wanted, at $134M.

Clooney's average is $53.9M. Jolie's? $49.0M.

I say all this because of Salt, and the way Jolie is being presented as a box office juggernaut.

It'll be interesting to see how it does.

Comments

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Cruise gravitates towards action movies, which tend to be bigger earners, whilst Jolie and Clooney have peppered their career with more interesting fare adopting a less commercial slant (Changeling, The Men Who Stare At Goats). I'll go see Knight and Day, but it certainly won't be because it's a "Tom Cruise movie".

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

I agree completely. As I say in the most recent comment to the Clooney post that started this (albeit two years ago):

*^*^*

Clooney isn't making choices to max out box office. Intolerable Cruelty is probably the most piercingly accurate satire of "Hollywood" since Swimming With Sharks (The overrated The Player, while enjoyable enough, is not as accurate as either of them). The one-two punch of Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck may be the most patriotic set of films of the last decade. Solaris plays with its world so well that most people (and critics) come out siding with the sole identifiably crazy person in the story. Those aren't conventional choices, but they're certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

*^*^*

OTOH, there is certainly the POV that box office is the end-all and be-all of Hollywood fame. And all I'm saying is, if so, then it needs to be applied even-handedly -- at which point Jolie gets far more ink than is proportional to her success.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It isn't just about the action movies, though, because Julia Roberts does far fewer of those (can't think of any besides maybe Pelican Brief) than Jolie does and yet Roberts has an average BO of 71.2 M.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Roberts tends to turn up in smart thrillers or comedies, the kind which tap into a female constituency whilst still attracting male audiences. Duplicity, for instance, or the ensemble romcom Valentine's Day. It's about as close as modern movies get to Katherine Hepburn's roles in the 1940s.