The Most Valuable Movie Stars Used To Make Sci-Fi Seem Very Different

While Iron Man 3 was controversial for stepping outside the usual superhero-movie template, it still made mad cash, bringing in $1.2 billion worldwide.

As for Downey, he was so damn good at playing Tony Stark that we’d happily keep buying tickets to watch him in the role well into his golden years. At the time, Robert Downey Jr. was set to return for The Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015. Prior to landing the Iron Man role, Downey didn’t have much sci-fi on his resume: he was in the 2006 Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly and he had a role in John Hughes classic Weird Science.

Leonardo DiCaprio earned his slot on the list for The Great Gatsby, but only a few years prior he was playing the lead in Christopher Nolan’s trippy mind-heist flick Inception, which earned $817 million worldwide.

He’s no sci-fi veteran, to be sure, but that could have changed in the years to come, especially if you factor in projects he’s producing. He was attached or rumored to be attached to Joseph Kosinski’s Twilight Zone movie, the time travel TV series The Shining Girls, a new take on The Island of Dr. Moreau, and an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

None of those came to fruition, but it was cool to think about him drifting into this genre.

Of the top three, Jennifer Lawrence was the one whose wagon was hitched to science fiction in a major way for the foreseeable future. As the lead of the Hunger Games franchise, she’ had the one-two punch of science fiction and “based on a popular young adult book series” to work with, in addition to being talented and down-to-earth.

The first Hunger Games movie hunted down $693 million worldwide, and Catching Fire crushed as well. And there were still two more to go after that, which didn’t quite do the same numbers. Just give her all the money now and be done with it. Oh, and after that she got into the comic book game with X-Men: Days of Future Past.

While Sandra Bullock wasn’t a name you would have associated with science fiction in the past, that changed in a big way with the release of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity. The movie was a massive box office hit, and for good reason.

Honestly, we were seriously flabbergasted. While we expected Gravity to be amazing, we didn’t foresee it being the sort of movie that would connect that well with general audiences at all.

The lesson is you can’t underestimate the appeal of spectacle done well. And let’s not forget the sci-fi nugget hiding in Bullock’s back catalog: Demolition Man.

Speaking of surprises, who the hell saw World War Z coming? The early trailers didn’t look great and the general buzz was largely negative in the months leading up to it. But then a wave of early reviews skewed more favorably, and suddenly, the zombie-pocalypse flick’s fortunes had changed. Changed to the tune of half a billion dollars worldwide, making it Pitt’s most successful movie to date.

And it wasn’t a bad flick at all, even though it veered well away from the Max Brooks book that inspired it. There was supposed to be a World War Z sequel in the works, but that never came to fruition. And, of course, we’ll always love him for his entertainingly batshit performance as Jeffrey Goines in Twelve Monkeys.

Well, they can’t all be winners. In spite of his high ranking on the list, Will Smith’s only 2013 flick was the M. Night Shyamalan dud After Earth. It was savaged by the critics, and although it took in $245 million worldwide, with a budget of around $130 million, it wasn’t enough to count it as a “win” category.

This is one that was easy to see coming. The trailers looked stilted and awful, Will Smith seemed to have been drained of all his charm, and it was directed by Shyamalan, who has been on a truly staggering losing streak since, if we’re being charitable, The Village.

Will Smith remained a huge draw, obviously, but this one was a miss.

The man who was Batman occupies slot #7, but there just isn’t much sci-fi on his plate at this point. WE award him some consolation points for 2002’s Equilibrium, even though his overly shouty version of John Connor in Terminator Salvation is best left forgotten. Oooh, and 1,000 steampunk/Tesla points for The Prestige! Moving on…

Man, we were on such a nice streak there. Sadly, Denzel Washington may still be a dynamite talent and a box office draw, but in total he’s not so much with the sci-fi. Then again, the genre hasn’t been terribly kind to him over the years, so we can’t really blame him.

His previous sci-fi flicks were 2010’s The Book of Eli and 2006’s Deja Vu, neither of which set the box office on fire.

Before that, you have to go back to Virtuosity, and I think we can all agree that nobody wants it to come to that.

Also not a frequenter of science fiction, Tom Hanks still earns major cred for lending his cachet to Tom Twyker and the Wachowskis’ ambitious Cloud Atlas the previous year. One of his roles in that film was arguably the weirdest role in the weirdest sub-section of a weird-ass movie, so kudos to one of the biggest movie stars in the world for not being afraid to step out of the safe zone.

Plus, he was doing Gravity before Gravity was doing Gravity, back when Apollo 13 hit in 1995 (And let’s not forget the excellent From the Earth to the Moon miniseries.)

His star fell a bit that 2013 summer with the disappointing performance of Disney’s The Lone Ranger, but there was hope of science fiction riding to his rescue, astride a white steed called Transcendence.

Depp was set to play the lead in the much-anticipated 2014 flick, which would mark the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan’s long-time cinematographer.

After much secrecy, the official plot synopsis was released over the summer: Depp would play Will Caster, a scientist who has his consciousness uploaded onto the Internet. “Once there, is it really Will who is interacting with humanity in order to make things better, or a darker sinister clone bent on the termination of the world as we know it?”