Hollywood finally has an old-school movie star, and it has no idea what to do with it – The Irish Times

The movie star is back. We finally have a successor to Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, and Julia Roberts. Or so the theory goes. Sydney Sweeney, alumna of the poignant HBO drama Euphoria, for the first time in years made the case that human tissue is more valuable than intellectual property.

The biggest Hollywood rumors this week were regarding reports that Sweeney may not appear in a movie. Someone decided that she would star opposite Johnny Depp, a controversial figure since his divorce from Amber Heard, in an upcoming movie called Day Drinker. There was a lot of froth from those for or against Depp’s rehabilitation before an influential newspaper closed the door. “Sweeney’s rep confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that she is not participating in Day Drinker,” that magazine told us.

The point is that commentators thought Sweeney, currently on our screens in the well-received horror film Immaculate, was the perfect person to snatch Depp from near-cancellation. (It opens with a movie later this month, so let’s not get carried away.) It was like getting an endorsement from Taylor, or Fonda, or Roberts.

It took a while for Sweeney to become an overnight sensation. Born in Washington state during the dying days of the last century, she had early roles on series like Everything Sucks! and The Handmaid’s Tale but were already signed up as part of the Euphoria ensemble as of 2019. No show, in recent years, has brought more stars to the mainstream. Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, Hunter Schaeffer, and of the older generation, Oscar nominee Colman Domingo recently appeared alongside Sweeney in the raunchy teen drama.

She had a small role in the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She was brilliantly annoying in the first season of The White Lotus. The next jump up the ladder came with two very different films from 2023. Her performance as the award-winning whistleblower, Reality, in Reality, confirmed that she could act against any competitor. Her role opposite Glen Powell in Anyone But You proved she could sell a genre that seemed to be dying. Hollywood, on the big screen level, has recently given up on romantic comedies, but this film, which ran for several months, gradually grossed $218 million.

( Sidney Sweeney on the demands of creating reality: ‘Once we got into that room there was no way out’ )

( Who is the Amber Troll? Review: The ongoing exploration into the defamation case between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard reveals a startling revelation )

Sweeney entered the new year as the anointed one, and the culture, as you know, immediately turned into cuckoo banana pants. The most ridiculous manifestation of Sweeney’s obsession came after her appearance on Saturday Night Live. We won’t dwell on the puerile language, but suffice it to say that many right-wing sources felt wearing a short dress somehow proved, in the words of Richard Hanania, head of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, that “wokeism is dead.”

The Spectator and National Post, conservative publications in the United Kingdom and Canada, respectively, joined Ananias in his dance around the waking fire. The idea that Sweeney herself might be a right-winger took a hit when she was seen producing and appearing in an attack on the Catholic Church. (It’s not really). Ananias, also author of The Origins of Woke, had a perfect rebuttal. “I think we can reconcile this by classifying Sweeney as a member of the Nietzschean right,” he wrote. Nurse, monitors!

All this nonsense doesn’t matter. Just note that it is Sweeney who is being talked about. No one (to my knowledge) defines Anya Taylor-Joy or Florence Pugh as neo-Nietzschean. Sweeney is one. She’s here to save cinema. Forget Taylor, Fonda and Roberts. It’s Brigitte Bardot. It’s Marilyn Monroe. right?

Well, let’s not get carried away. Sweeney is a good actor. She has charisma. she is intelligent. But it cannot do much to change the mechanism surrounding it. The argument for its status as an old-school star is partly due to an apparent vacuum in the intellectual property economy. After the poor performance of The Marvels, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is in a state of uncertainty. DC had its own bombs with Blue Beetle and Shazam! The wrath of the gods. Even the presence of one Sweeney in a smaller role couldn’t save Madame Web. There won’t be a new MCU movie this year.

But that doesn’t mean Hollywood is ready for a reboot. These businesses have lived within matrices of intellectual property—interconnected entities that emerged from existing entertainment empires—for so long that they have forgotten how to do it. They once made modestly priced mysteries, dramas, musicals, and romantic comedies for the big screen. Identifiable movie stars sold these films to regular attendees. A massive turning circle is needed for the good ship Hollywood to return to that sea lane.

Sweeney is a movie star. It remains to be seen whether the studios still know what to do with such a creature.