Stardom Down To A Formula

            While there are many ways in which celebrities come to receive there star status, it seems that the majority of which, particularly in the film industry, come from a single outstanding performance which turns commercially successful. It isn’t all that unusual hear of “one hit wonders” in music, where a band has one song blow up and go huge and then subsequently fall back into obscurity, or where one particular TV star excels in a certain role but fails to make the jump into cinema. I feel this is fairly rare in cinema however, where one roll can cement someone at a pop icon over night. I would assume this is because once that one actor or actress has a successful roll, this is used as a formula to turn out more successful films with that person in that specific kind of roll, simply because its been proven to be financially successful.One person that comes to mind almost immediately is Bruce Willis, as he had several rolls in romantic comedies, one of which was a bomb in the box office and one of which was moderately successful prior to his roll in Die Hard, which grossed $81M on a meager $22M budget. Once big studios/producers/managers/agents see the successful formula they clamor to maintain this image and to continue to use it. Since Die Hard, Bruce Willis has been in over two dozen action films playing the same tough/badass/hero roll that he had in Die Hard itself. Even films that are not action based market his roll in accordance to this persona. In the trailer for The Sixth Sense, Willis, who is a major character in the film, is almost never shown unless he is in the midst of a high-octane action shot, often edited to push this to an even greater extent. Once filmmakers and financers noted the “Bruce Willis” formula, they fleshed it out as much as they could, and still continue to do so, as Willis, even with his age, is still set to star in action films up until late 2015, and it would not be surprising to see more follow, simply because of this success formula. Because of this, Willis has spent just over two decades building on this badass image that was first presented with his role in Die Hard in 1988. This image has gone beyond film too, with Willis having publicly supporting the U.S. Military. He has gone over to the Middle East multiple times to visit troops, donated 12,000 boxes of girl scout cookies to deployed members of the Navy in the Middle East, even expressed interest in joining the military to fight in the second Gulf War, but was dissuaded because of his age. This all ties into this character type, and while there is a good chance that he genuinely enjoys this kind of thing, I would assume that his managers, agents, etc. definitely played a significant roll in the presentation and coverage of such matters, because it sells, and because this kind of activity would being more validity to this character, because why would you want to watch an average guy play a badass roll when you could watch an authentic badass play a badass roll? The Bruce Willis example is just one of many that I can think of like this (Stallone, Eastwood, Statham, S. Jackson, Neeson, Schwarzenegger, etc.), especially in the action genre.