Angelina Jolie is a box office queen with Maleficent , but Seth MacFarlane is shooting blanks in his big screen debut, A Million Ways to Die in the West .
Universal Pictures; Frank Connor / Disney; Adam B. Vary / BuzzFeed
The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that franchise movies with identifiable brand name characters are far more valuable at the box office than the movie stars who play them. Hugh Jackman on his own isn't much of an audience draw; Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, however, still very much is.
But this weekend, one bone fide superstar — Angelina Jolie — asserted just how much power a single actor can still hold over the box office. Meanwhile, a man who has created his own wildly popular comedy brand — Seth MacFarlane — proved there are limits to his jack-of-all-trades success.
The Jolie-led Maleficent opened with an estimated $70 million, the best box office debut in the actress' career, even when adjusting for inflation. It is also one of the highest opening weekends for a solo female star ever, behind only the first two Hunger Games movies. To be sure, Maleficent was an opulently designed, big canvas movie based on one of Disney's most beloved animated features, 1959's Sleeping Beauty.
But the film was sold almost exclusively on Jolie's otherworldly face. By contrast, Columbia Pictures presented The Amazing Spider-Man 2 largely as a confrontation between Spider-Man and Electro, not between Andrew Garfield and Jamie Foxx. Jennifer Lawrence kicked major butt as Mystique in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but that film featured a sprawling ensemble cast — and was sold as such. Maleficent's main draw was all about seeing Angelina Jolie embody one of the best Disney villains of all time: Come see Angelina with horns! And wings! And cheekbones that could cut you! It's nearly impossible to imagine any other actress working today who could take on that role with as much anticipation — and ultimate success — as Jolie, and that is a mark of a true movie star.
Lorey Sebastian / Universal Pictures
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