In response to a general “anecdotal evidence” and based on studies and research on the subject, the US site The Ringer has compiled data and opinions to understand if and how much actors and leads in the most important films are becoming less and less young.
Among the anecdotal pieces of evidence, the most talked about in recent weeks concerns the success of Top Gun: Maverick, the only film of 2022 to gross over $1 billion, and an action film starring now 60-year-old Tom Cruise, and where much of the cabin is maintained by Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Val Kilmer and Ed Harris, all in their 50s and 70s.
In Top Gun: Maverick, the young protagonist – one of the most promising young men in cinema in recent years – is Miles Teller, who is 35 years old. Much more than the 23 Cruise had in 1986 when the first Top Gun was released, the was chosen for the success of Risky Business at the age of twenty. For the centrality he still has in cinema and behaving almost as if the 80’s and 90’s were never over, Cruise is certainly a special case, maybe even unique.
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Yet Cruise’s uniqueness notwithstanding, The Ringer has found other evidence that fewer and fewer young actors (and, to a lesser extent, actresses) were the focus of many films during the first two decades of this century.
“Over the last 20 years, and particularly over the last 10/15, the average age of actors at the center of major films and series has risen significantly,” The Ringer wrote, drawing largely on data already presented by film analyst Stephan follows. While in the last decades of the 20th century the protagonists had an average age between 30 and 40, “today the average age has passed 40 and is rapidly approaching 50”. There are certainly exceptions — Stranger Things is primarily based around a teenage cast, with Zendaya and Tom Holland being 25 and 26, and established actors like Ryan Gosling and Chris Hemsworth being 41 and 38 — but the trend is there.
To support his thesis, The Ringer shows several graphs, almost all linked by a clear trend: if between the 1980s and the 2000s the average age of the main actors was basically stable and always less than 40 years, immediately after 2000 the ” average age”. increases, generally over 40 years around 2010, and then continues to increase, in many cases without significant interruptions. It happens in graphs analyzing the ages of the first, first two and first three main actors of all films on the IMDb site with over a thousand reviews (that is, about 3-4 thousand films a year), but also happens when you watch only the 200 or so films that surpass 10,000 reviews each year. The same thing happens when you only watch movies, or the analysis focuses only on comedy, action, and feature films.
Similarly, The Ringer noted that over the past twenty years, there has been a significant decrease in the number of films in which at least one of the two leads is under thirty, and at the same time those in which one of the two leads is over sixty. The analyzes based on IMDb data are corroborated by a number of insiders who were consulted by The Ringer and joined them in trying to understand the reasons.
A first factor highlighted concerns the difficulty of launching and creating new real movie stars. First there is the fact that with so many films and series available and with content that is often consumed and outdated in a few days, it is difficult to find actors or actresses who are truly multi-generational and capable of making a huge to unite audiences.
Tom Cruise was Tom Cruise for almost everyone for years and was able to achieve a level of awareness and “cultural penetration” that is very difficult today. For those who don’t watch Stranger Things, Millie Bobby Brown is almost unknown today; For over a decade, Robert Downey Jr. was small next to Iron Man.
According to some people contacted by The Ringer, it’s also possible that the easier access to celebrities afforded by the internet and social media may ultimately lead to a reduction in their celebrity status. In the 1980s there were few places and opportunities to see Cruise from a movie, and even today the actor uses Instagram mainly for promotional purposes and almost never spontaneously to show or tell about his personal life. Today, however, many young actors obviously show themselves more.
Much more drastic was author and film historian Mark Harris, who said: “A generation cannot produce movie stars unless it genuinely loves the cinema which those stars should support and host.” So it may also be that the stars of this generation are simply somewhere else, albeit in a fragmented and often quite volatile culture.
Another reason for the rise in the median age of actresses and actors at the center of film lies in the almost total absence in contemporary cinema of those mid-range films (not small, but not even blockbusters) that often served to build the fame that recited there. To this must be added the increasing success of franchises, sagas and long film series, which by their very nature tend to repeat the presence of already famous actors and, when presenting new ones, do so by accompanying them to familiar faces and hardly succeeds in young ones Making actors more important than the characters they play. Suffice it to say, as analyst Jeff Bock noted, that now “the actor’s name on the poster is a rarity.”
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It’s not that the possibilities are completely absent: a starring role in Game of Thrones or a major role in a new Star Wars can certainly add a lot. It’s just that the opportunities are rarer and the results rarely last. Adding to the lack of interest in focusing on genuinely new faces is that in recent years there has been an increasing tendency of cinema makers to risk as little as possible to focus on established narratives, stories, genres and protagonists.
In a very fragile situation, we also have to take into account that the average age of cinema-goers is generally increasing. It is impossible to say whether the age of the viewers is a consequence of the age of the actors or whether it is the other way around. However, it’s certainly understandable that the easiest way not to lose older viewers is to offer them stories and faces they already know and love.
Bruce Nash, 54-year-old founder of The Numbers movie database, said: “I would probably be more inclined to see an action movie with Liam Neeson than Tom Holland; and similar things happen in romantic comedies: the protagonists are no longer in their twenties, they are often in their forties, often looking for a second romantic chance ». Speaking of an action film, it’s also not secondary that for a variety of reasons (including the wide opportunity to use special effects and digital rejuvenation) it’s easier today, if only compared to thirty years ago, a sixty-year-old is somehow believable as the protagonist of one action movies.
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Moreover, as The Ringer points out, this doesn’t just happen in the movies: “Historically, even the most important politicians, musicians, tennis players and quarterbacks age.”
As the data presented by The Ringer shows, the general considerations of increasing median age apply to both actors and actresses. For actresses, however, the increase was somewhat slower and, above all, there is still a certain gap between the average age of the actors and that of the actresses, who are often chosen younger than the actors they have to act. However, this gap appears to be narrowing.