Action stars are loving video-on-demand

On Hunter Killer and the rebirth of straight-to-video

This may come as some surprise but over the past five years Gerard Butler has made about half as many movie as Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis. The latter two aging action stars have both appeared in about 20 movies each, while Butler has acted in a comparably paltry nine, including this weekend's Hunter Killer, a semi-polished but low-rent potboiler about a U.S. submarine involved in rescuing a Russian president from a military coup that could start World War III.

Why do these numbers feel wrong? A skim of IMBD shows that all three stars are making similar types of movies: lots of cop pictures, action pictures, military or military-adjacent pictures. The big difference between Butler and his older counterparts — and why Cage and Willis' output feels so surprising — is in how these movies are released. Most of Butler's movies, even the smaller ones, have been theatrical features. Most of those recent Willis and Cage movies have been gone straight to VOD — video-on-demand, the streaming equivalent of direct-to-video — sometimes accompanied by a regional and/or contractually obligated one-week stint in theaters.

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Jesse Hassenger

Jesse Hassenger's film and culture criticism has appeared in The Onion's A.V. Club, Brooklyn Magazine, and Men's Journal online, among others. He lives in Brooklyn, where he also writes fiction, edits textbooks, and helps run SportsAlcohol.com, a pop culture blog and podcast.