Mr. Big Celeb
Photo: Paramount Pictures/Sabrina Lantos / Universal Pictures and Blumhouse
It took about ten minutes of Mason Thames on the big screen in Regretting You for me to figure out who he was. I leaned to my friend and said, “That’s Black Phone.” By “Black Phone,” I did not mean the heavily marketed, Freddy Kreuger–esque villain of The Black Phone franchise — that’s the Grabber, played by Ethan Hawke and his abs. I meant Thames plays the ostensible lead of The Black Phone and Black Phone 2: the child turned teen terrorized by the Grabber. The films have grossed more than $200 million worldwide. For $100, do you think you could name the character Thames plays in those movies? Nice try, but it’s Finney Blake, as in “Mason Thames is Finney Blake.”
Horror movies are not necessarily judged by your ability to remember a protagonist’s name, but 18-year-old Thames is in the unique position of being in not one but three No. 1 movies at the box office this year. There’s the aforementioned Black Phone 2 as well as his turn as Miller Adams, a character seemingly named after two brands of beer, in Regretting You. Thames also starred in this summer’s live-action reboot of How to Train Your Dragon as Hiccup, a character I could only identify as “not Jay Baruchel” (who voiced Hiccup in the animation). America clearly loves Mason Thames and has flocked in droves to see his films throughout this year. Josh O’Connor who?
Thames’s box-office bash is remarkable at a time when fall movies with big names — Emma Stone, Channing Tatum, Julia Roberts — struggle to break even. Perhaps the lack of big names, however, is why Thames has had such an easy ride to the top this past year. He’s essentially the boy king of IP, indicative of audiences who care much more about seeing something they already know than seeing stars enact something with “vision” or “point of view.” How to Train Your Dragon is about dragons, not the guy training them. The Black Phone is about the Grabber. Regretting You is about whatever crazy stuff Colleen Hoover wants her female characters to go through; the male characters are pure accessories. Thames is remarkable because he’s so unremarkable. Like a LEGO brick, you can plug him in just about anywhere and he makes sense.
Just because he’s some guy does not mean Thames is entirely juiceless. In fact, he might have a significant amount of juice. He is far and away the most charming part of Regretting You, the rare male love interest who doesn’t actually do anything wrong but instead sits by patiently while Mckenna Grace acts insane toward him throughout the film. With his signature lollipop, Miller Adams is kind of a nouveau bad boy — not actually bad at all, just slightly alternative. Thames has solid comedic chops, drawing laughs from the audience out of a twitch of an eyebrow. His box-office success ties the 1994 record set by Jim Carrey, who had back-to-back-to-back hits with Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber. Wait — there’s an idea. If Thames wants to keep his streak going, he could do worse than a prequel like Ace Ventura: Vet School or The Mask: Origins.
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