Why Oscar Winners Keep Becoming Superheroes

Yet another top-line actor is putting on cape. Why?

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

For decades, Hollywood analysts and gossip-hounds warned Academy Award winners about the "Oscar curse": a sudden, sharp career downturn immediately after winning the industry’s most coveted prize. The idea, it seemed, was a straightforward one: Having climbed cinema’s greatest heights, there was nowhere to go but down.

But in recent years, a less intuitive direction has repeatedly been presented to Oscar-winners: Up towards the sky, like a bird or a plane. If the "Oscar curse" was ever real, it has since mutated—like, say, the venom carried by a radioactive spider, or the gene that turns people into X-Men. Today, if an actor or actress takes home an Academy Award, there’s a decent chance their next move will be putting on tights and a cape.

The latest Oscar winner to circle a superhero blockbuster is Brie Larson, who won the Best Actress Oscar just a few months ago for her layered, heartbreaking starring role in Room. Larson is reportedly Marvel’s first choice to play the title role in Captain Marvel, which is bound for release in 2019 (though, as with Captain America: Civil War’s Tom "Spider-Man" Holland and Chadwick "Black Panther" Boseman, there’s a pretty good chance the character would debut before that in an earlier Marvel blockbuster, like 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War—Part 1).

If Larson does sign up to play Captain Marvel, she’ll be in very good company. Jared Leto followed up his Oscar-winning turn in Dallas Buyers Club by taking on the role of the Joker in Suicide Squad (and, presuming it’s a hit, his own spin-off movie). Plenty of other Oscar winners—Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, Anne Hathaway, Christoph Waltz—have juggled their Oscar-garnering performances with the demands of a superhero blockbuster.

And it works the other way, too. Do a close examination of the cast of your average superhero blockbuster, and you’ll find it riddled with names that routinely turn up at the Academy Awards. Just look at the Avengers. Robert Downey Jr. is a two-time Oscar nominee. Jeremy Renner is a two-time Oscar nominee. Mark Ruffalo, who took over the role of the Incredible Hulk from three-time Oscar nominee Edward Norton, has also been nominated three times. And while Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth—both relatively unknown when they were cast as Captain America and Thor, respectively—got in at the ground floor of the MCU, the bar for landing a plum role a superhero blockbuster is getting higher and higher. Doctor Strange, the next big Marvel blockbuster, features Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Rachel McAdams—all Oscar nominees—starring opposite Tilda Swinton, who took home a Best Supporting Actress trophy for Michael Clayton in 2007.

Does it really take that much talent to carry a superhero blockbuster? At the risk of being uncharitable: No. Whether you love them or hate them, the not-so-secret secret about superhero movies is that they don’t require all that much acting. Most of the action sequences are handled by special effects and stunt people; most of the presence and gravitas is handled by how one looks in a costume; most of the audience is there because they love the genre and the character, not the actor or performance. For someone like Brie Larson, who won an Oscar for an emotionally wrenching drama set largely within a single room, acting opposite a seven-year-old, it’s like a little like asking a trained surgeon to sit down for a game of Operation.

It’s obvious, of course, why the studios are so eager to line up top-tier acting talent for each superhero movie. With so much riding on each individual franchise, and so much competition at the box office, they want to do everything in their power to make sure every superhero is in good hands. The more interesting and complicated question is why an Academy Award-winning actor would sign away so much of that valuable post-Oscar window of time to the demands of a multi-part superhero franchise.

Let’s get the first and most obvious answer out of the way: caaaaaaaaash money. Acting is a profession, and actors want a payday. And superhero franchises can be insanely lucrative. Just ask Robert Downey Jr., the highest-paid actor in the world, who earned a staggering $80 million in 2015, and nets tens of millions more each time he straps on the Iron Man suit.

But all in all, the superhero business isn’t as lucrative as it might seem. According to one insider, Downey Jr. netted $50 million for The Avengers—but some of the film’s other stars earned as little as $200,000. And the emphasis on popular characters over popular actors makes it much easier to swap in one actor for another; just ask Katie Holmes, Terrence Howard, and Edward Norton, whose roles were recast in massive hits like The Dark Knight, Iron Man 2, and The Avengers. According to Terrence Howard, his role was specifically recast because Marvel thought he was being paid too much: "Look, we will pay you one-eighth of what we contractually had for you [to appear in Iron Man 2], because we think the second one will be successful with or without you," he recalls Marvel saying. (For what it’s worth, the studio was right.)

But if starring in a superhero movie isn’t as lucrative as it might appear, it does offer a kind of intangible cachet. Read any interview with a purportedly "serious" actor who pops in a superhero blockbuster, and you’ll find some version of the phrase, "I wanted to make a movie my kids could see." In 2016, blockbuster franchises don’t just drive the box office; they are the box office, and any actor who wants to be recognized around the world—an increasingly important consideration, as the international box-office continues to make up a bigger chunk of the overall pie—gets a shortcut to international superstardom just by signing up.

A savvy, career-driven actor with an Oscar in his or her hand looks at this crowded landscape of interconnected superhero blockbusters and sees one of Hollywood’s rarest commodities: stability. If you line up a role as an Avenger or a Justice Leaguer or an X-Man, and don’t make too many waves, you’re setting yourself up for at least a decade of steady paychecks and name-brand familiarity, an asset you’ll be able to trade on whenever you hang up the cape and cowl. And you’ll be doing it alongside many of your generation’s finest actors, who have signed up for the same exact deal.

Given the circumstances, it’s hard to blame them, but I’ll admit there’s a part of me that breathes a small sigh of relief when a movie like Fantastic Four bombs. Because instead of getting a Fantastic Four 2, we'll get a slew of new movies starring Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, and Kate Mara in the time they would have spent making and promoting the sequel. There’s nothing wrong with a superhero blockbuster, but I’d rather live in a world in which at least a few of Hollywood’s most promising young talents aren’t locked down behind a mask with a five-picture deal.

Latest in Pop Culture