slot8 Hollywood Is Desperate for Movie Stars. This Year, the Cavalry Arrived.

As you may have heard, Hollywood has hit a rough patch. The box office has been wobbly, A.I. is looming and this year’s biggest live-action hit, “Deadpool and Wolverine,” is a Marvel movie that cracks jokes about how lousy Marvel movies are these days.

Amid this turmoil, though, there is hope. Something welcome is happening — and it promises a brighter future for the movie industry. In the parlance of a blockbuster, Hollywood has discovered its one, its savior, its Lisan al Gaib — that messianic figure who can lead the industry out of the desert and back to prosperity.

That figure is the movie star.

Not just a movie star but the idea of the movie star — the kind of larger-than-life pop-cultural force whose appeal stretches across all genres and demographics. Of course, this figure used to be plentiful — Hollywood relied on them to carry movies for decades. But sometime in the 1990s the movie-star factory started to falter, especially for men.

There were famous actors, sure, but fewer and fewer of those brand-name, put-him-in-a-fighter-jet-cockpit-or-behind-a-cocktail-bar species of movie star that Hollywood had always cultivated. Maybe it began when promising young stars like Ethan Hawke, Joaquin Phoenix and Heath Ledger all seemed to bristle at the movie-star machinery that would cast them as leads in summer blockbusters. Maybe the star-making machinery stalled for good when Hollywood realized that Marvel movies and their ilk are marketed on heroes and not who wears the costumes. But this year finally offers hope that movie stars are making a triumphant return.

We should start with an actress such as Zendaya, who had exactly the kind of year that movie stars are supposed to have: She starred in an all-ages sci-fi blockbuster (“Dune: Part 2”) and a sexy, R-rated surprise hit (“Challengers”). But the truly promising development for Hollywood was with the men: guys including Glen Powell, Timothée Chalamet, Paul Mescal and Dev Patel. For decades, male movie stars were Hollywood’s most reliable product, as the industry churned out icons such as Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant, Clint Eastwood and Sidney Poitier — the kind of actor whose surname became a shorthand for a whole identity as a man.

No one was injured in the escape, which happened about 12:30 p.m. on Sunday. Firefighters for the city of North Attleboro who were working at a rodeo at the Emerald Square Mall said they had seen eight bulls break loose from their pen, the fire chief said in a previous statement.

The apotheosis of the movie star economy was likely the 1980s, the heyday of your Stallone and Schwarzenegger, your Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford. Some of the members of that cohort are still active today, carrying action franchises well into their 60s, 70s and even 80s, with a little help from de-aging technology. They’re still here because no one’s come along to replace them, after a generation of would-be matinee idols was drafted to wear superhero tights and sign six-movie contracts with Marvel.

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