There's an odd piece by Tom Scocca over at Defamer headlined "Why Is Angelina Jolie a Movie Star?" This is a weird question to ask. One could easily rephrase it thusly: "Why is this tall, attractive, charismatic Oscar-winning actress who is pretty reliable at the foreign and domestic box office while maintaining a high public profile a movie star?"
It's a real mystery, I guess.
Granted, I'm biased. If you can't tell from the opening grafs of my Maleficent review, Angelina Jolie's one of my favorite people in Hollywood. I hold Hackers and Gone in 60 Seconds in bizarrely high esteem. Even still, though, I think Scocca's question is a strange one. The meat of Scocca's argument is thus:
Some of her movies have been well-received acting vehicles. Some of her movies have been gargantuan commercial products. There is no place where those circles overlap on the Venn diagram. You could write a comprehensive history of the past 20 years of American popular cinema without mentioning a single Angelina Jolie film.
The first point is questionable, and kind of depends on just wishing away Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Wanted, Salt, and Maleficent, which are all pretty solid flicks featuring very good performances and did monster numbers at the foreign and domestic box office. The second point is probably fair, though there's an argument to be made that between the Tomb Raider franchise, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Wanted, and Salt, Jolie helped set the stage for, and craft the personality of, the modern female action star.*
Being a movie star, though, means "putting butts in seats." And Jolie has pretty consistently done just that. Let's look at her work since 2005's Mr. and Mrs. Smith:
Some of those are bigger hits than others,** and there are a couple of legit bombs (The Good Shepherd and Beowulf). But it's pretty undeniable that she's a "movie star" in the sense that "she makes movies that people go see." There's a reason that she appeared on the Quigley Poll of highest-grossing actors three times between 2005 and 2010. That may not sound all that impressive, but the only women in the post-Easy Riders, Raging Bulls era to top that figure are Julia Roberts (10 appearances), Sandra Bullock (six), and Meryl Streep (four, two of which came in 1984 and 1985).***
So, why is Angelina Jolie a movie star? She's a movie star because people want to see her in movies. It's not really rocket science.
*Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton notwithstanding, the Tomb Raider films predates and undergirds the Underworld and Resident Evil films and you can see echoes of her one-slight-woman-wrecking-crew sensibility in, say, Scarlett Johansson's whole action star persona.
**As always, it's important to keep in mind that the studio takes roughly half of the gross and that budget figures don't include advertising costs. Then again, these figures don't include revenue derived from home viewing (DVD, cable/streaming rights, etc.).
***A few actresses had three appearances, including Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, and Whoopi Goldberg.