Why are there no more Arnold Schwarzeneggers?

Or Bruce Willises, or Tom Cruises, or...

I watched Kindergarten Cop recently, a really delightful and hilarious movie from the Schwarzenegger heyday. It’s hard to believe now, since Arnold’s career is mostly limited to social media posts and the occasional creaky, wheezy CGI-filled action role, but there was a time when Schwarzenegger was everywhere, on every single theater marquee and at the top of everyone’s must-see list. (This was also a time, kids, when movies were often thought of as “must-see,” a socio-linguistic convention that’s more or less disappeared.) From 1984 to 1994 Arnold was in a whopping sixteen movies, most of them really landmark films that are still embedded firmly in the culture: The Terminator, Commando, Predator, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop, Terminator 2, True Lies. He had a few forgettable scrubs in there, but most of these movies were and are just purely enjoyable, absolute entertainment from start to finish, filmmakers and artists at the peak of their game year after year.

Kindergarten Cop is like that. It’s a great premise: John Kimball, a cop from Chicago, goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher in Astoria, Oregon to try and protect a woman and her child from a bad guy. The movie is not concerned with the surface-level believability of its assumptions. Kimball is a gigantic, hulking, thick-accented beefcake of an immigrant who somehow ended up as a detective in the Chicago Police Department; he punches his way through the gritty streets of Chicago, beating street crooks to a pulp in broad daylight and blowing apart criminal dens with dozens of slugs from a sawed-off Stakeout shotgun; a moneyed, refined elementary school allows this trigger-happy cop to pose as a kindergarten teacher, potentially putting a few dozen five-year-olds in the line of deadly gunfire. It’s fine. It’s really all pretty believable after a certain point, and honestly that was the cachet that Arnold had back in the 80s and early 90s. He was great, people loved him, they were willing to put up with a faintly ridiculous idea if the movie itself was good.

But that’s the thing: Who is Arnold anymore these days? Who’s the movie star who combines that level of bankability and audience goodwill? Who even rises to that level of recognizability anymore? For around three decades, if you said “Arnold,” everyone knew who you were talking about; his name meant something to everyone—it meant something good—and it was just a part of the culture. (If you wanted to discuss Arnold in a serious, more thoughtful manner, you said “Schwarzenegger.”) What movie star these days is powerful and ubiquitous enough to have that kind of mononymic power?

It’s not really just Arnold, of course. In the 80s and 90s, and into the early 2000s, moviegoers enjoyed a real blockbuster lineup of movie stars who, like Schwarzenegger, were both instantly recognizable and well-loved by audiences: Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Keanu Reeves, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, Denzel Washington, Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis. A lot of these guys are still making movies here and there, but there has been no concurrent wave of up-and-coming young stars moving to take their place as the older guys age out of the business. Think of the A-list celebrities you can name in 2023. Who are they? Chris Pratt? One of those Hemsworth guys? Jennifer Lawrence, maybe? Maybe Ryan Gosling? These are stretches. None of them rise to the sheer cultural juggernaut level of Shwarzenegger, or Cruise, or Willis, or Hanks. There’s just nobody like that working these days. There’s no Arnolds anymore.

We should reflect on why that is. Last year Jennifer Aniston observed that there are “no more movie stars” anymore, and “no more glamour.” There’s a reason for this declension, and you’ll be unsurprised to learn that Zack Morris the Elder thinks it’s mostly because of the smart phone. Years ago the movies were a magical sort of escape, a medium of exchange through which you could sort of comprehensively forget about the world for a bit, lose yourself and not worry about anything for a while. Movie stars assumed a specialized sort of role in this firmament, familiar faces upon which we projected a happy set of feelings and associations. It was good, harmless stuff. What now? The smart phone offers a 24/7 escape for everyone who uses it. Look around the next time you go out: Everywhere you go everyone’s on one, always drawn in, forever escaping, ever-distracted, never-present. What the movies used to provide in healthy doses, the smart phone provides in comprehensive form. We don’t need Arnold anymore, or any of them. We have our phones.

Maybe that’s a stretch. But I don’t think it’s a mistake that the beginning of the decline of the movie-star-qua-movie-star can be tracked quite closely to, say, 2007-2010 or so, coinciding quite perfectly with the emergence and rise of the smart phone. Look back at when the cinematic landscape began to shift to its present miserable condition and you can see the seeds emerging around that time. The sad fact is that the dearth of Arnolds today isn’t a natural, inevitable phenomenon, but rather one we chose, deliberately and eagerly. The era of the movie star is over because we preferred our phones instead. There are no more Kindergarten Cops, just phones. It’s the world we’ve created for ourselves.