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" Is Shia LaBeouf a movie star? I&amp;#039;m sure he thinks so, as do the studio executives who pay him millions of dollars to act in, promote, and &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; their movies. And they&amp;#039;re not wrong ... exactly. Here&amp;#039;s a guy, still in his twenties, who has worked with Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, and the immortal Michael Bay; he&amp;#039;s got nearly $2 billion in global box office, the same, give or take, as Leonardo DiCaprio, Denzel Washington, and Brad Pitt. And between run-ins with the law and the occasional starlet, he keeps himself in the news. But when was the last time anyone said, &amp;quot;Hey, I gotta catch the new Shia LaBeouf movie&amp;quot;? When was the last time the mention of the name Shia LaBeouf was enough for you to grab your keys, drive to your local multiplex, and spend twelve bucks on a movie you might not otherwise have seen? In all the ways that matter most to moviegoers, Shia LaBeouf isn&amp;#039;t really a movie star \u2014 he&amp;#039;s a guy who plays with Transformers.   I don&amp;#039;t mean to single out LaBeouf unduly. He&amp;#039;s a good-looking kid and a fine actor and I&amp;#039;m sure he&amp;#039;s great to his mom. But along with almost every actor who&amp;#039;s emerged from obscurity over the past decade, his name and presence in a movie don&amp;#039;t consistently produce the kinds of profits (much less the cultural buzz) that Hollywood has historically required of its stars. For that, the studios continue to look to the figures of the fin de si\u00E8cle and even the Reagan era: Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Will Smith, Adam Sandler, and the Toms (Hanks and Cruise) continue to top distributors&amp;#039; polls \u2014 along with Denzel and Leo, a relative youngster whose breakthrough came fifteen years ago. Where are the hotshots with the charisma to captivate a nation? Where is the irresistible force to knock these middle-aged charmers off their perch? Where are Hollywood&amp;#039;s new male stars?  It ain&amp;#039;t as easy as it used to be, becoming a movie star, mostly because the studios \u2014 or rather, the entertainment conglomerates that own them \u2014 have relatively little interest in producing new ones to replace the older models. For one thing: The middle-aged charmers still work just fine, especially in the international market that accounts for two thirds of Hollywood&amp;#039;s current grosses. For another: The most profitable movies of the twenty-first century are animated features, sci-fi action extravaganzas, and spectacular comic-book adaptations, and there&amp;#039;s no point in stars (and their egos and paychecks) when virtual unknowns can hold their own opposite robots and aliens.  But that&amp;#039;s just one side of the equation. Let&amp;#039;s say that a CGI-heavy superhero movie starring a virtual unknown is a hit: The studio gets to keep all its back-end profits, and the lucky now-somewhat-known actor can take his new career out for a spin in the kind of actorly movie that made him want to be an actor in the first place. The trouble is that few people outside of Sundance make those movies anymore. The past decade has seen a steady decline in the sort of small, offbeat studio films that, in many cases, allowed the previous generation of male stars to build a following movie by movie, character by character. Hanks first hit it big by playing oversized kids in Bachelor Party (1984) and Big (1988). Depp developed his distinctive outsider persona in Edward Scissorhands (1990) and What&amp;#039;s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). Pitt clicked as a supporting player in Thelma &amp;amp;amp; Louise (1991) but didn&amp;#039;t break wide until his weird-out trifecta of Seven (1995), 12 Monkeys (1995), and Fight Club (1999). And it wasn&amp;#039;t Batman &amp;amp;amp; Robin (1997) but Out of Sight (1998) that secured George Clooney&amp;#039;s future as a romantic idol.  Studios just don&amp;#039;t take that many chances on risky, middle-budget movies anymore (except when they&amp;#039;re anchored by established stars like Clooney [The Descendants] or Pitt [Moneyball]), and would-be stars have little time or opportunity to ingratiate themselves to audiences or accumulate goodwill. The star-making machine has stalled, and you can&amp;#039;t blame LaBeouf or Ryan Reynolds or Jake Gyllenhaal for the fact that audiences aren&amp;#039;t turning out in droves to see their every movie. We hardly know them. It&amp;#039;s no wonder that ambitious, magnetic young actors like Ryan Gosling, James Franco, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Michael Fassbender all seem more interested in having Sean Penn&amp;#039;s oddball, low-altitude career than Tom Cruise&amp;#039;s. There may be more misses than hits (and not nearly as much money or influence), but at least they&amp;#039;re playing on their own terms.  The fact is that it may no longer be possible for a young actor to make it big as a movie star, and it&amp;#039;s not for lack of talent or drive. Movies can now be consumed on a cell phone and, as demonstrated by the continued viability of independent film, produced on a laptop. Stardom itself has been further downscaled \u2014 or &amp;quot;democratized,&amp;quot; if you prefer \u2014 by Facebook and Twitter, and that we are all now performers twinkling in the vastness of cyberspace only serves to raise the bar for would-be professionals. The world is at once too big and too small, and there are both too many stars and not enough.  However, as the boss at MGM \u2014 the studio with the slogan &amp;quot;More Stars Than There Are in Heaven&amp;quot; \u2014 liked to say, America is a happy-ending country, and the generation of actors looking to break out now have a few things working in their favor. They come from all over \u2014 the farm systems of England and Australia; the critically acclaimed television shows that most people never bothered to watch (Friday Night Lights, Breaking Bad, The Wire); the candy-lined trenches of pop culture (Gossip Girl, Tron: Legacy) \u2014 and on screens large and small, they&amp;#039;ve developed the art of presence. (You might not recognize the six men pictured here, but they look like you should recognize them. That&amp;#039;s presence.) For another: Domestic theater attendance has sunk to its lowest point in seventeen years, and this falloff could give Hollywood executives the wake-up call they need to ease off the CGI blockbusters and reinvest in movies that let up-and-comers shine. It won&amp;#039;t be 3-D that saves the movies, after all. It&amp;#039;ll be the larger-than-life humans, the stars we know and the stars we don&amp;#039;t yet recognize, who will bring us back to theaters. With a little luck, it might even be these guys. -- Published in the September 2012 issue. J. Hoberman, the senior film critic at The Village Voice from 1988 until earlier this year, is the author of Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema? (Verso), available now.  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. On Johnson: Two-button wool suit ($2,560), cotton shirt ($545), silk tie ($205), and leather shoes ($830) by Louis Vuitton. On Kitsch: Two-button wool suit ($2,175) and cotton shirt ($325) by Dolce &amp;amp;amp; Gabbana; silk tie ($250) by Dunhill; leather monk-straps ($660) by Church&amp;#039;s. On Elba: Two-button wool suit ($2,850), cotton shirt ($520), and silk tie ($185) by Gucci; leather shoes ($745) by Santoni; leather belt ($128) by coach. On Hedlund: One-button wool suit ($1,295) cotton shirt ($225), and silk tie ($150) by Calvin Klein Collection; leather shoes ($1,600) by Salvatore Ferragamo. On Paul: Two-button wool suit ($1,920), cotton shirt ($490), silk tie ($220), and leather shoes ($695) by Prada. On Hammer: Two-button wool suit ($3,795), wool vest ($895), cotton shirt ($365), silk tie ($195), and leather shoes ($795) by Giorgio Armani. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a15115/j-hoberman-new-hollywood-stars-0912/>