re: Spielberg: "There Will be a time when Superhero movie go the way of the Western"

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The most profitable movies of the twenty-first century are animated features, sci-fi action extravaganzas, and spectacular comic-book adaptations, and there's no point in stars (and their egos and paychecks) when virtual unknowns can hold their own opposite robots and aliens.

But that's just one side of the equation. Let's say that a CGI-heavy superhero movie starring a virtual unknown is a hit: The studio gets to keep all its back-end profits, and the lucky now-somewhat-known actor can take his new career out for a spin in the kind of actorly movie that made him want to be an actor in the first place. The trouble is that few people outside of Sundance make those movies anymore. The past decade has seen a steady decline in the sort of small, offbeat studio films that, in many cases, allowed the previous generation of male stars to build a following movie by movie, character by character. Hanks first hit it big by playing oversized kids in Bachelor Party (1984) and Big (1988). Depp developed his distinctive outsider persona in Edward Scissorhands (1990) and What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). Pitt clicked as a supporting player in Thelma & Louise (1991) but didn't break wide until his weird-out trifecta of Seven (1995), 12 Monkeys (1995), and Fight Club (1999). And it wasn't Batman & Robin (1997) but Out of Sight (1998) that secured George Clooney's future as a romantic idol.

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