The Huffington Post: Robert Pattinson is a True Star

Brent Lang of The Wrap just doesn’t get it. Plain and sim­ple. In his provocatively-titled piece ‘Zac Efron and the Incred­i­ble Shrink­ing Teen Idol Stars’, Land sub­mits that the newest gen­er­a­tion of young stars (Zac Efron, Robert Pat­tin­son, Miley Cyrus, etc) have dis­ap­pointed at the box office even as the num­bers he uses fail to bear that out. Once again, a pun­dit has fallen into the clas­sic trap: Because a movie star’s lat­est movie has failed to match up with his or her all-time best per­for­mances, said actor’s star must be fad­ing. But it fails to take into account two obvi­ous fac­tors: not every film an actor makes is iden­ti­cal in appeal and mar­ketabil­ity, and a star can­not be expected to top their pre­vi­ous best every time out of the gate.

As I’ve said any num­ber of occa­sions, movie stars are worth cer­tain pay­days for cer­tain projects.

The absurd idea that a small inti­mate drama star­ring a given actor should be expected to per­form as well as a crowd-pleasing genre pic­ture is asi­nine. In fact, such expec­ta­tions actu­ally dis­cour­age actors from stretch­ing or try­ing artier or more chal­leng­ing works.

Sure Remem­ber Me ‘only’ made $55 mil­lion world­wide (on a bud­get of just $16 mil­lion), but that means that $55 mil­lion worth of tick­ets were sold com­pletely on the shoul­ders of one Robert Pat­tin­son (quick, raise your hands if you saw that one for Pierce Bros­nan or Chris Cooper.…?).

Thus, quite obvi­ously, Robert Pat­tin­son shouldn’t be get­ting paid nearly as much for Remem­ber Me as he did for Twi­light Saga: Eclipse. He didn’t, so the film’s box office should not be judged on the same level.

Pat­tin­son and Efron could spend their entire careers doing rip-offs of, respec­tively Twi­light and High School Musi­cal. The fact that they are instead mak­ing more chal­leng­ing pic­tures, and still post­ing decent returns, means that they are absolutely bank­able names on a rea­son­able budget

Star power isn’t open­ing some­thing that is already highly appeal­ing to a mass audi­ence that has the ben­e­fit of your name on the poster. Star power is scor­ing a rea­son­able or bet­ter open­ing week­end for a film that has noth­ing to offer except your name on the poster. On that scale, Miley Cyrus, Zac Efron, and Robert Pat­tin­son are gen­uine movie stars.

This arti­cle is edited to only include Rob’s por­tion, but the full arti­cle is here on Huff­in­g­ton­ Post!

Source via ThinkingofRob