Coming of aged: why is Hollywood bringing back veteran stars?

From Tom Cruise to Michael Keaton, A-listers can’t resist the urge to resurrect the roles that made them. But will nostalgia be enough to woo people back to cinemas?

Imagine you fell into a coma some time around the start of the millennium and just woke up. What year is it? You scan the cinema releases for clues. Let’s see: Keanu Reeves just had a new Matrix movie out, Tom Cruise has a Top Gun sequel coming out, Patrick Stewart is on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, Jamie Lee Curtis is working on yet another Halloween sequel, and Michael Keaton is returning as Batman. Surely you’ve only been out a few months? Except, wait a minute: all these actors appear to have aged several decades. Except Tom Cruise, which is even more confusing.

Welcome to the new reality of franchise movies, which is suspiciously like the old reality. Everywhere you look, veteran actors are being dragged out of retirement and back to roles they thought they’d moved on from years, even decades, ago. It’s like the opposite of cancel culture. It used to be that A-list actors would occasionally dip their toes in a blockbuster world when they had a new house or a divorce to finance, say, but increasingly they are finding that, as the Eagles would put it, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

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