Dear Gossips,

Glen Powell is on the cover of Esquire’s October issue, because JJ Abram’s The Great Beyond, in which he stars, was supposed to hit theaters in November, only it got moved to October 2027, taking over The Batman Part II’s original(ish) release date (that movie might legit be cursed).

So, Esquire’s profile, written by the extravagantly named Madison Vain, is something of a boondoggle, a remnant of a schedule f-cked by the Paramount/Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Madison Vain makes the most of it, turning it into a kind of state of the union for Glen Powell.

The claim is that Powell “conquered Hollywood”, which I do not think he has, and I say that as someone who LIKES Glen Powell and is rooting for him. We need stars like him! We need the hungry ones who want to be capital-letter, neon-lights Movie Stars. We need the actors who want the big projects, the “butts in seats” projects, and that is certainly the niche Powell seeks to fill. He has made no secret of making Tom Cruise his mentor—“TC” comes up in this interview, naturally—or of his ambition to be a big, neon-light Movie Star. We need That Guy as much as we need the next indie arthouse king.

But I don’t think Powell is there yet. Certainly, he made the most of his breakout moment with Top Gun: Maverick, following that up with legit hits like Anyone But You and Twisters, and Hitman, which passes for a hit via Netflix’s math, but he has stalled over the last year. The Running Man bombed, How to Make a Killing did, too, though to less fanfare than The Running Man’s collapse (which Powell correctly attributes, at least in part, to Paramount’s constant merger crises, and at least he’s willing to name and blame that sh-t). Season two of Chad Powers is streaming now on Hulu, but is anyone watching it? (No.)

But next year Glen Powell will be back with the double whammy of The Great Beyond, now a holiday season blockbuster hopeful, and Judd Apatow’s The Comeback King, which is teased in Esquire as being about a washed-up country singer trying to get his career back on track, and Stavros Halkias plays the “sleazy manager”. Honestly? You had me at “Stavros Halkias plays a sleazy manager”.

2027 will be a sort of test for Powell then. It’s less about putting butts in seats, we have a sense he can do that, thanks to Twisters. Now, it’s about the comeback. Appropriate, maybe, that he’s got a movie called The Comeback King, because while Glen Powell isn’t exactly in need of a total reset, he does need to show how he handles bouncing back from high-profile flops. Everyone’s got to do it eventually, it’s just his turn.

After we get through these new films in 2027, after we see how audiences respond to being reminded of Glen Powell’s existence—he’s kept a relatively low profile this year—THEN we can talk about whether or not he’s “conquered Hollywood”. Because one thing is true, we have been looking for Tom Cruise’s successor for years and we have yet to truly find the next reliable Movie Star (though Cruise himself will be bouncing back from Digger). Though after years of being more famous than he was successful at the box office, depending on what happens with Starfighter next year, that blockbuster guy might just end up being Ryan Gosling, the indie arthouse king of the 2010s. Next year is going to be an interesting year at the movies.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah

Photo credits: Billy Kidd/Esquire

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