This year, 68-year-old Harrison Ford will be mixing it up with Old West-invading extraterrestrials in Cowboys & Aliens.
Next month, 67-year-old Robert De Niro will star in the action thriller Limitless. When The Expendables II opens in 2012, the combined age of its top five prospective stars, God willing, will be 291 years.
The landscape of recent motion pictures, in particular Manly Movies, looks increasingly like the last days of the dinosaurs.
The performers are greying (never literally, of course), the shooting and editing is getting tighter (to suggest, rather than capture, physical exertion) and if one were to compare the future of Hollywood He-Men to say, The Terminator, there would be few replacement parts in the warehouse.
Who's coming along to fill the shoes of Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis - or even Liam Neeson, who is currently starring in the highbrow espionage thriller Unknown ? Orlando Bloom? Yikes.
"There's Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy is becoming a movie star, Christian Bale, a few others," said Unknown director Jaume Collet-Serra, who may be obliged to be pro-Neeson but still has a point.
"It's hard to find an actor who has the physicality, the good looks, the charm all on top of being an amazing actor - that's the most important thing, but not always what people pay attention to."
It's largely a question of gravity. And money: The older stars still draw crowds. "They do," said Paul Dergarabedian, who tracks box office for the industry at Hollywood.com. "If the movie is cast properly, it doesn't matter if the actors are younger or older, as long as they can sell it on screen.
"I think Red was a great example of a film that's taking the concept of the ageing action star and putting it front and centre," he said, citing the recent comedy thriller starring Willis, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich. "Sort of like The Expendables , which kind of said `if one older action star can't bring people in, maybe five of them can'."
That film starred Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin and Mickey Rourke (plus an uncredited Willis and Schwarzenegger), cost $US80 million ($NZ105 million), and has thus far made $US274 million worldwide.
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