By Dan Brown

There are no more A-list celebrities.

Not if you define the term as an actor whose appeal is so broad, they can put enough bums in seats to ensure their new motion picture debuts in the top slot at the box office on its opening weekend.

According to this definition, guess who’s not on the A-list? 

Some big names. 

Tom Cruise. Brad Pitt. Anne Hathaway.

You may have heard how Cruise, the performer known for starring in the Mission Impossible and Top Gun franchises, came out with a new movie a couple weeks ago.

Known for marketing the hell out of his work, Cruise’s megawatt smile and fetish for doing his own stunts couldn’t compel enough moviegoers to march to movie theatres earlier this month for a No. 1 debut.

His environmental satire Digger pulled in just $8 million when it opened in theatres on the weekend of Oct. 2.

You read that right – not $80 million, but $8 million. That amount made it the No. 4 movie that weekend. 

It’s expected, according to such news sources as Variety and Forbes, Digger will lose $245 million, making it one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history.

And Cruise isn’t the only celeb who has been kicked off the A-list in recent weeks. 

Pitt’s Heart of the Beast, in which he co-stars with a German Shepherd, earned the third slot with $20 million when it opened on the weekend of Sept. 25. 

That may seem like a solid number, but consider this: The re-released Avengers: Endgame pulled in $26 million to win that weekend – and it’s a movie from 2019. 

There were signs Heart of the Beast was in trouble when the marketing campaign began to focus on Pitt’s canine co-star. That’s right: The cute dog was featured more prominently than Pitt himself. 

That’s how little confidence the film’s makers had in the laconic actor’s ability to draw an audience.

Oh, and did you know Anne Hathaway had a movie out earlier this year? Not Verity or the Devil Wears Prada sequel or The End of Oak Street, but Mother Mary, which premiered the weekend of April 24. 

You likely aren’t the only person who hasn’t heard of it. Mother Mary was rejected by movie fans, coming in ninth that weekend with a total of $1.3 million. Hathaway probably owns houses worth more than that.

The through line here is how having a big star in your motion picture isn’t a guarantee when it comes to performing well at the box office. We are conditioned to think such celebrities as Tom Cruise are sure bets when it comes to drawing a crowd, but it ain’t so. Their gravitational pull isn’t all that reliable.

This is happening in the same year when feature films without big names – think Backrooms and Obsession – became wildly profitable after being marketed on the strength of their “concept” (Hollywood’s buzzword for a film’s genre), and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in box-office revenue.

The unavoidable conclusion: Star power isn’t working at the multiplex right now.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.