Hollywood has been fretting over the death of the movie star for nearly a decade now, and the fear is not unfounded: The golden era when the likes of Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, and Denzel Washington could coax audiences to the cinema with sheer name recognition seems to be passing into memory without enough proper successors to take their places. For a while, franchise sequels, which produced a whole new group of leading men and women, appeared set to replace the classic star vehicle. Many of these works, however, are built around familiar characters, not the people portraying them; actors such as “the Chrises” (Hemsworth, Evans, Pine, and Pratt) have at times struggled to maintain their commercial success outside of the popular intellectual property that launched them.
Now the industry is in a bit of a strange no-man’s-land. Once-reliable bets, such as established brands and genres, are floundering somewhat, and stars seem to matter less and less. But this moment feels artistically exciting, if financially risky: During Presidents’ Day weekend, none of the top five films at the box office was a sequel, and only one, Wuthering Heights, was based on an existing property. Odd phenomena such as Iron Lung, a horror movie self-funded by a popular YouTuber that has grossed nearly $50 million worldwide, also suggest that there are innovative ways to appeal to theatergoers. Another emerging trend skews more classic Hollywood—directors, particularly those who might be considered auteurs for their well-defined aesthetic and storytelling style, have begun to matter just as much as the actors attached to them. Yes, 2026 will bring a new Avengers installment, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and a Michael Jackson biopic. What’s atop the Rotten Tomatoes list of the year’s most anticipated releases, though? A note that Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan have new movies on the way.
For decades, if there was one filmmaker most viewers could identify, it was Spielberg. In the 1970s and ’80s, the director of smash hits including E.T. and Jaws established himself as such a force that his mere participation as an executive producer (on movies as varied as Gremlins and An American Tail) functioned as an automatic guarantee of quality. A few other blockbuster figures came close to ascending to that status in the years that followed, including James Cameron and Peter Jackson; certain indie breakouts, such as Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee, became minor celebrities through sheer force of personality. But lately, as Hollywood has struggled to sell its films on the backs of big stars, hard-core cinephiles—the type of moviegoer who buys tickets months in advance and logs everything they’ve seen on Letterboxd—have begun emphasizing the role of the director in deciding what to watch. Studios now seem to be picking up on this interest: The prerelease discussion of Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, for instance, primarily frames the movie as his grandest effort yet, despite the presence of A-listers such as Matt Damon, Zendaya, and Tom Holland.
Spielberg’s name, after all these years, still holds cachet—it is the only one above the title on the teaser poster for the sci-fi drama Disclosure Day, out this summer. Yet even lesser-known filmmakers have become a selling point: The latest reboot of The Mummy is titled Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, making the young writer-director sound like the next cause célèbre in that genre (regardless of whether critics agree or not). And Wuthering Heights, which topped the box office in its opening weekend, was prominently touted as the latest work from the director Emerald Fennell, despite the fact that her two prior films had made only about $20 million apiece worldwide. Fennell’s penchant for love-it-or-hate-it erotic melodrama has distinguished her work among moviegoers; the resulting cultural fascination has helped her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel pull in $150 million globally thus far.
Why studios are clinging to this kind of branding is easy to see. The two most Oscar-nominated films this year are Sinners and One Battle After Another, R-rated dramas from the directors Ryan Coogler and Paul Thomas Anderson. Neither movie, on the surface, sounds like an obvious success: Sinners is a music-filled vampire story set in 1932 Mississippi; One Battle After Another is a nearly three-hour-long, generation-spanning, political action-dramedy. Yet they won over not only critics but also wide audiences. Among the year’s other big-budget productions, the films stood out to cinemagoers as idiosyncratic and stylish, with resonant themes of family and community. They captured each director at a professional turning point as well: Anderson has received Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture, for his previous work, yet he had rarely broken through to a mainstream audience—let alone made something at this scale. Sinners, meanwhile, was Coogler’s leap out of the world of franchises (he made Creed and the two Black Panther installments). The movies’ highly personal nature meant that Coogler and Anderson were as prominently discussed as their superstar leads, Michael B. Jordan and Leonardo DiCaprio.
In the particular case of Coogler, placing him front and center in Sinners’ marketing makes sense. He’s a young, vibrant, charming presence; he recently went viral for his paean to Freestyle soda machines on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast. He also talks about cinema nerdery—film stock, aspect ratios—in an accessible way. Studios have clearly taken notice of how warmly viewers respond to this more inside-baseball approach, as promotional campaigns and social-media collaborations that happily lean into technical language have grown more common in recent years. Back in 2023, Christopher Nolan sold younger audiences on Oppenheimer by detailing the mechanics of IMAX-footage projection in clips with Reece Feldman, a TikTok creator whose film-production-themed videos has established him as Hollywood’s “Gen-Z whisperer.” Ahead of One Battle After Another’s release in September, Warner Bros. trotted Anderson out to explain the VistaVision cameras he used to shoot it, drumming up excitement among the average moviegoer about a niche type of cinematography; the studio even worked with a handful of theaters to show it in the vintage format. And the filmmaking team Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, regarded for their visual maximalism and subversive storytelling, just broke down the bespoke theater experiences planned for Project Hail Mary, their upcoming sci-fi movie—including rollercoaster-like immersive options.
Obviously, having major stars involved is still valuable. Timothée Chalamet, who leads the Oscar-nominated movie Marty Supreme, is a rare younger actor to qualify as a household name—a fact that he used to Marty Supreme’s advantage by dominating the press tour. Anderson, whose previous films were made with modest funding, would likely never have gotten One Battle’s blockbuster-size budget approved without DiCaprio’s attachment. Project Hail Mary has Ryan Gosling on board as part of its big push, which includes a Saturday Night Live–hosting gig and a (faux) Jeopardy appearance. Gosling, despite his level of fame, nonetheless has only two major hits to his credit: Barbie and La La Land. Meanwhile, in Julia Roberts’s heyday, even a midsize movie for grown-ups could have made $100 million with her name behind it. Gosling’s presence matters, and his work selling a movie will likely garner any studio the vital “impressions”—attention on social media, podcasts, YouTube—that it seeks. But packaging actors, or even popular franchises, with a director known for their specific point of view is becoming a prime selling point, upping a project’s artistic bona fides.
Perhaps the best example is Barbie. Warner Bros. and Mattel took the gamble of handing the brand to Greta Gerwig, who had emerged from the micro-indie mumblecore movement before netting Oscar attention with Lady Bird and Little Women. The self-referential pique of Gerwig’s filmmaking style was vital to Barbie’s gigantic success and its awards nominations; meanwhile, her star Margot Robbie’s next project, the romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, vanished without a trace in 2025. Next from Gerwig is an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, the first chronological book in the Narnia saga, which Netflix is using to relaunch the beloved series this Thanksgiving. The previous big-screen versions of Narnia, in the 2000s, were directed by Andrew Adamson and Michael Apted—neither of whom meant much to most ticket-buyers. Narnia was the only name that mattered; now Gerwig’s will be just as important.
It’s unlikely that Hollywood will ever see a return of the truly freewheeling days of the ’70s, when studios took chances on letting auteurs such as Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, and Martin Scorsese reinvent a stuffy system and push storytelling boundaries. Superhero sequels such as Avengers: Doomsday and Supergirl are still major pillars of the 2026 release calendar, along with the new Dune, Super Mario, and Star Wars movies. The overreach of the 2010s saw the industry assume that audiences would always show up to reheated editions of the same genre formulas, only to be proved wrong. Directors whose personal style has become a box-office draw likely won’t be able to fill the financial gap left by audiences’ declining interest in long-running franchises—but for the sake of cinema, trusting the artist is always going to be worth the gamble.
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