Orlando Bloom was a big movie star once.Or, was it the movies that were big?
Bloom is not so old that he should already be over the hill. He's only 42. But not only is he over it, the hill is not even in his rear view mirror.
He's entered full-on Travolta-Willis territory if the movie I saw advertised at one of the video kiosks who email me is any indication. Not only is this obviously straight-to-video, but The Shanghai Job is the perfect name for a straight-to-video movie.
The thing about Bloom that, superficially, makes such a fall from grace seem kind of shocking is that he once held a pretty impressive record, albeit not one that can be entirely credited to his own talents. The internet is being stubborn about corroborating this for me, but if I'm not mistaken, Bloom's movies had once grossed more than the total grosses of any other working actor.
It makes sense if you think about it. At the time he had this record -- if he had it -- he had appeared in three Pirates of the Caribbean movies and three Lord of the Rings movies. That was enough to launch him ahead of Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, or anyone else you might suspect would boast similar earnings for their movies. (Ford would have surely passed him on the back of the Force Awakens box office haul, and I feel like Samuel L. Jackson is now head and shoulders above everyone else, considering his appearances as Mace Windu and the very small role he had in both of the last two Avengers movies, the second of which is now the highest grossing movie of all time.)
It always seemed strange to me that Bloom was this guy, but I also knew that people -- maybe primarily women -- really liked him. He was a bonafide star, I think, for a while at least.
But he dropped off so quickly and so precipitously that I have to wonder if he ever had it at all, or if he was just lucky that Peter Jackson and Gore Verbinski happened to take a shine to him.
Bloom's six-year "imperial period" -- a term I learned from Slate podcaster Chris Molanphy, regarding a musician's period of creative and commercial dominance -- was pretty spectacular, running from the 2001 opening of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring to the 2007 opening of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The epics Troy and Kingdom of Heaven also fell in this period.
But after that?
Welp ...
Bloom was of course in two of the next three Peter Jackson Middle Earth movies, starting in 2013. But even by then they almost felt like weird cases of Bloom coming out of semi-retirement. I haven't seen a single film he appeared in from the years 2008 to 2012. That includes missing a movie I might have seen, The Three Musketeers, but the others are truly nothing movies.
After The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in 2014, it gets even worse. I did see (and like) Joe Swanberg's Digging for Fire in 2015, but I didn't remember that he was in it, and even if I force myself to remember that fact, I get only a vague memory of finding it really weird to see him. He had a cameo in the most recent Pirates movie, but by then he already looked ... old and thick? Would that be uncharitable?
If he just stepped away because he had money coming out of his ears, and wanted to concentrate on a personal life that I remember making the tabloids one too many times, that's fine. People disappear from prominence for all sorts of reasons, and it isn't only because Hollywood chewed them up and spat them out. But showing up in this ... thing above? It renders a different verdict. Only after being spat out do you come back and make The Shanghai Job, which is only called that in the UK and here, I'm learning. Elsewhere (the movie started out in China, it sounds like) it was called S.M.A.R.T. Chase. Which is ... not good.
I've done only a superficial dive into what may have caused this sudden transformation into a pariah, not the deeply researched bit of journalism you should not be accustomed to expecting from me. But at least part of it seems to be a preference for the stage. If he did indeed have money coming out of his ears, a turn to the stage is perfectly respectable, and more power to him.
But when you're in The Shanghai Job, it's a cry for help, isn't it?
It may be that Orlando Bloom knew that he had gamed the system somehow, that he truly was the beneficiary of some luck and the favor of some powerful directors, and that if he were expected to forge his own career after this he'd have a hard time of it.
Maybe he knew that once there was no right place or time, his time was up.
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