For a while, there's been talk of 'the death of stardom', with young actors not able to match the clout of Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Will Smith et al. But that might be changing.

There has been no lack of conjecture about what, precisely, makes a Movie Star. Most people would easily name examples for you, but might struggle to define why or how those examples were special. Film scholar Richard Dyer calls the star both "ordinary and extraordinary" in his seminal 1979 text, Stars, while academic and writer Jeanine Basinger, in her 2007 book The Star Machine, writes of Hollywood's production line: "Sometimes a manufactured product turned out perfectly. Sometimes it blew up in the shopping cart". And as Lauren Bacall once put it: "Stardom isn't a profession. It's an accident."

For the powers that be, it certainly seems that whenever you try to bottle it or reproduce stardom, it vanishes. Many square-jawed hunks who look the part – say, Sam Worthington in Avatar, for instance – have been tried out by major Hollywood studios and fallen totally flat with audiences. Meanwhile others – like skinny teenager Timothée Chalamet in gay romance Call Me By Your Name – have climbed a strange and stellar path to the A-list. He is starring in mega-sci-fi franchise Dune, whereas in another decade he'd be doomed to playing foppish kid brothers in perpetuity. The fact that stardom has a kind of sketchy refusal to follow any exact science is maybe what makes it so endlessly fascinating to discuss.

In a changing Hollywood post-Covid, with cinemas under threat and once-all-powerful streamers in disarray, it has been said frequently that there are no new movie stars. Perhaps movies had become too CGI-driven, too high-concept, too much about explosions and superheroes to really care about the human element, or faces in close-up that had been central to drawing crowds in the past. As Charles Bramesco, a film critic for The Guardian with a special interest in film stardom, says: "The dearth of movie stars is downstream from a grander and more elaborate problem, which is the studio system's turn away from the mid-budget vehicles that turned likeable talents into household names". In recent years, there have been many less adult dramas, as well as comedies, especially of the romantic variety, which as Bramesco points out, "were once the bread and butter of Big Hollywood – but the (false) industry wisdom that they can't be banked on as reliably as special-effects bonanzas has resulted in big-time brain drain".

That might account for why one of our biggest current contenders for the role of Movie Star – Glen Powell – first got mainstream audience members' attention with the box-office success of a romantic comedy. Last year's rom-com Anyone But You, opposite fellow burgeoning star Sydney Sweeney, is the kind of late 90s/early 00’s throwback wherein two very attractive people hate each other but through a series of zany plot machinations are forced to admit they actually love each other. Powell, handsome in the old-school sense, with wavy blond hair and a sharp jawline, is a Texan to top it all off (even his name makes him sound like he should be in 1940s pictures with the likes of Tyrone Power). Powell first played supporting roles in films like Top Gun: Maverick as the jock you loved to hate but also kind of loved. (Tim Rothman, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures, recently told Variety that "Glen is the classic example of talent meeting opportunity.") Anyone But You went on to gross $220 million in cinemas internationally, starting off slow but becoming a sleeper hit, through word-of-mouth and a long theatrical window.

Similarly, in Richard Linklater's comic crime caper Hit Man, now on Netflix, Powell has bursting romantic chemistry with love interest Adria Arjona; along with the film's perfect calibration of Powell's sexiness and goofiness, it's no surprise he's been embraced by audiences. Combined with red carpet footage of him toting his pet dog Brisket – and more importantly, perhaps, Tom Cruise's tacit approval of Powell as a successor when he appeared to support his former co-star at the European premiere of Powell's latest film........

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