In one recent interviewEmilia Clarke reviewed her post-‘Game of Thrones’ career with unusual frankness. About ‘Secret Invasion’ he said: “I don’t think anyone liked the series.” On ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’: “The viewers were not happy either.” On ‘Terminator: Genisys’: “It should never have happened.” He adds: “But they were jobs I said yes to. I joined franchises that were already big and established. That’s why I don’t take it personally.” It is difficult to find a better summary of how the big franchise business works in Hollywood.
Some collections. Let’s see if Clarke’s feeling that they were failures is accompanied by data. ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ cost between 275 and 300 million dollars and raised 393 million worldwide. According to is calculatedDisney lost about $77 million on the film, making it Star Wars’ first commercial failure.
‘Secret Invasion’ had a production cost of 211.6 million dollars, a figure known thanks to the transparency demands of the UK tax incentive program, where it was filmed. More than ‘Barbie’ or ‘Oppenheimer’ cost that same year. Viewership figures on Disney+ in its first five days were the second lowest of any MCU production, only above ‘Ms. Marvel’. Critical reception was equally poor. Regarding ‘Terminator: Genesis’, 155 million budget, collection insufficient to justify sequels that had already been announced, and weak reviews.
It’s not the first. In 2021, with the MCU still dominating the box office, Anthony Hopkins summarized his experience in the ‘Thor’ trilogy, between 2011 and 2017: “They put armor on me and gave me a beard. Sit on the throne, shout a little. If you’re sitting in front of a green screen, it’s acting in front of nothing.” Chris Hemsworth came to similar conclusions: recognized that in ‘Thor: Love and Thunder‘ “I got stuck improvising and clowning around, and became a parody of myself.” This time, critics and the public accompanied him in doubts.
Hemsworth has described the dynamic that he calls “the curse of the superhero,” which is simply that “you get pigeonholed.” But at the same time he rejects the attitude of actors like Clarke, who criticize Marvel when their projects don’t work: “They are successful movies: put me in one. Mine doesn’t work? Well, I attack them all.”
What Clarke is really saying. The heart of Clarke’s complaint is that major franchises operate as hiring machines that offer global visibility and financial rewards that few independent productions match. In return, the actor’s creative control over the result is minimal. Clarke said in the same interview that in ‘Game of Thrones’ she received the scripts and did “everything in my power to understand and empathize with the decisions.” This was not the case in later franchises.
Not just Marvel. The pattern is not exclusive to a single franchise. When actress Jamie Lee Curtis rejected in 2022 participate in Marvel projects, he did so with the same type of argument as Hopkins: “they will stick stitches in my body and force me to perform in some warehouse.” What does seem to be clear and Clarke demonstrates is that when there is a commercial failure, actors seem to feel freer to point out the obvious shortcomings of a system in which they are just more meat for the content grinder.
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