When you hear “team-up movie” in 2024, you probably think of something likeThe Avengers,Justice League, or most recently,The Marvels. That’s what I tend to think of, too, and for good reason. When The Avengers arrived in 2012, it fundamentally altered what audiences expected from Hollywood movies.
But before The Avengers, when you heard “team-up movie,” you thought of something like Oceans 11, a movie that brought together a huge cast of movie stars, not characters. Danny Ocean, Rusty Ryan, and Tess Ocean were incidental. You were there to see George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts.
That changed during the years of Marvel’s dominance. Anthony Mackie explained this well, saying that in the superhero era, movie stars were no longer the draw.
“Anthony Mackie isn’t a movie star. The Falcon is a movie star,” Mackiesaidin a 2018 interview. “And that’s what’s weird. It used to be with Tom Cruise and Will Smith and Stallone and Schwarzenegger, when you went to the movies, you went to see the Stallone movie. You went to see the Schwarzenegger movie. Now you go see X-Men. So the evolution of the super hero has meant the death of the movie star.”
This makes it significantly more difficult to get anything that wasn’t IP-related off the ground for filmmakers. If audiences are trained to show up for characters, not actors, they’re less likely to watch an original movie.
TheDuneseries, though still IP, is shifting this back in the other direction. Unlike the Marvel movies, which slowly introduced long-beloved comic book characters to the big screen, Dune dropped a ton of characters on moviegoers at once. We can keep them straight because we know the actors playing them. It’s easy to understand that the Emperor is an important and powerful guy, because he’s being played by Christopher Walken, the oldest member of the principle cast with a long, storied career. Movie stars have, traditionally, been able to do just this: provide inroads for the audience to become invested in the story. If I’m a big Tom Hanks fan, it’s easy to root for him in You’ve Got Mail, despite the fact that, on paper, there are plenty of reasons we shouldn’t like him.
With its emphasis on characters over actors, the MCU nearly killed this aspect of movie stardom. We weren’t excited to see Robert Downey, Jr. and Chris Evans in a movie together when the first Avengers came out; we were stoked to see Iron Man and Captain America sharing the screen. And that indifference shows. The MCU’s stars have had trouble opening movies that aren’t MCU related, as a result. Robert Downey, Jr.’s first big post-Endgame project, Dolittle, was a box office bomb. And that’s when they even try. Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth’s biggest movies post-Endgame have all been streaming releases like the Extraction series, The Gray Man, and Ghosted.
Dune is returning to the century-plus old tradition of building excitement for an ensemble film by assembling a monstrously star-studded cast. This isn’t a movie that will make entirely new stars — all of its four young leads have starred in their own major movies. Instead, director Denis Villeneuve has pulled from the biggest young talent pool in Hollywood, and is helping them elevate to the next level. Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya are already enormously famous. Florence Pugh starred in one of the biggest movies of 2023, and Austin Butler was part of a huge box office success with Elvis. The characters they’re playing aren’t iconic, except for the very small population of rabid Dune fans. Instead, they’re making them iconic through their star power. After years of our best stars being less important than the suit they were wearing, that’s a welcome change.
