Hollywood signals death of the star system

When 84 year-old Sumner Redstone 'fired' Tom Cruise 18 months ago, ending his lucrative 14-year relationship with Paramount Pictures, some saw it as the petulant outburst of a grumpy old man who didn't understand how the Hollywood star system worked.

But now Redstone's abrupt dismissal of Hollywood's biggest star of the last 20 years looks eerily prescient. Number crunchers at the Hollywood studios have reached a startling conclusion: the highest earning stars are simply not worth the enormous sums of money they are paid, and the studios are determined to cut them down to size.

In the last decade it became common for top stars like Cruise, Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks to be paid an upfront fee of $25m per picture plus enormous profit participation deals. Mission: Impossible III, for example,

made around $400m at the global box office. Cruise took home about $95m while Paramount, which had taken the risk of putting up the $150m budget, ended up with a profit of just $10m.

Since then, a slew of movies starring some of Hollywood’s biggest and highest-paid stars have failed miserably. The Good German, starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire, took just $1.3m at the US box office. Leatherheads, the most recent film to star Clooney, whom Time magazine recently hailed on its cover as 'The Last Movie Star', looks very unlikely to make back its $58m budget. The Invasion, starring A-listers Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, made just $15m, having cost $85m to produce. Even such comedy stars as Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell have had serious misfires in the last year.

"Here's the new benchmark for predicting box-office performance: if a movie-star heads the cast, downgrade the forecasts," says Peter Bart, editor of the Hollywood trade paper Variety. "Some distributors inevitably