Star-Packed

Red,an action picture; New Year’s Eve,a romantic collage; and The Avengers,which collects superheroes from Marvel,are examples of group enterprises for the future. Sony’s Grown Ups and New Line’s Valentine’s Day showed the power of ensemble in months past. In recent years,series like Twilight and Harry Potter have been thick with cast and characters,For Robert J. Thompson,the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University,the multiplicity is no accident. “There’s a much larger thing going on here,” Thompson said. He theorises that feature films are reaching toward the complex,multi-character scenarios that have made hits of sophisticated television series like The Sopranos.

Others are less sure. “I don’t know that anything is changing” in terms of storytelling patterns,said Marc Platt,a producer of the cast-heavy Scott Pilgrim. That film just happened to be based on a comic book story that required Pilgrim to defeat his girlfriend’s seven “evil exes.” So the movie got seven villains,led by Jason Schwartzman.

Even so,Platt said,falling star salaries and a declining number of films have made it easier to round up an ensemble. “A lot of actors want to go to work.”

That was apparent at the Comic-Con International pop culture convention last month in San Diego,where Edgar Wright,the director of Scott Pilgrim,introduced a panel that included no fewer than 13 cast members. Sylvester Stallone,who directed The Expendables,had only about half of his outsize cast in tow. And then there was Bruce Willis.

“I think over 75 movie stars are in Red,“ said Willis,who was flanked by his Red co-stars Helen Mirren,Mary-Louise Parker and Karl Urban. They carried the flag for an ensemble that also includes Morgan Freeman,John Malkovich,Richard Dreyfuss and Ernest Borgnine.

“I don’t think the ensemble film has ever quite taken root in America,” film historian David Thomson said. “It goes too much against the grain of stardom and stories about ‘important’ people.”

If that is changing,the shift may have something to do with an increasing willingness by film studios to play demographic games that were once reserved for television. “It gives you a palette with a lot more colour,” he said,pointing out that a large cast allows marketers to add appeal across ethnic and generational lines.

Still,the number of famous faces does not count for much if the films aren’t worth watching,as Roger Ebert,the longtime critic,observed. Cast size, Ebert wrote,“has nothing to do with whether a picture is better or worse.”