I’ve never been much good at maths, but here are some figures even I can quickly grasp. According to recent US box-office statistics, A Mighty Heart, the overwrought Angelina Jolie vehicle about Mariane Pearl, the widow of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, has taken $9m in receipts, just over half of the $16m it cost to make. Similarly The Invasion, starring Nicole Kidman, has so far made back only $15m, against production costs of $80m. Not exactly a bankable result from 2006’s highest paid actress, whose usual fee is more than the sum of The Invasion’s takings.

“Here’s the new benchmark for predicting box-office performance,” wrote Peter Bart in Variety, the industry magazine he edits. “If a movie star heads the cast, downgrade the forecast.” Video may not have actually killed the radio star, but celebrity magazines are killing the box-office power of the A-list.

Brad and Angelina: At breaking point over ‘other man’; The truth about Jennifer (Aniston) and Orlando (Bloom); How Catherine Zeta-Jones lost a stone — these are just a cursory sample of coverlines. The veracity or otherwise of any of these stories is not the point. The ubiquity of them is another matter.

Now there is blanket coverage of celebrities, why pay £10 to see them in the cinema? Focus is so much on what is allegedly going on in their personal lives that to see them playing someone else feels almost like a distraction from the main question that week — who cares how effectively Jolie conveys a widow’s grief when the real question is whether she and Brad will survive until Christmas. And, a true cynic might add, why watch a story about Mariane Pearl, whose ending you already know, whereas the Brad and Angelina show rolls on into waters unknown?

More worrying for the studios and actors is that now the focus is so much on their personal lives, it’s more difficult to believe their performances. This probably reveals more about my own limitations than Brad Pitt’s but, personally, I find it tough to see Pitt as Jesse James in The Assassination of Jesse James when I am force-fed supposed details of Pitt’s home life every time I walk into WH Smith. Yes, this is called “acting”, but I now feel I know so much about Pitt’s life that it is like watching my brother act, and, no matter how good an actor he might be, it would also be a leap to see him as Jesse James. Shallow this may be, but a lot of other people seem to be on my level: The Assassination cost $30m to make, and it has made only $2m back so far.

It is telling that Will Smith was recently named the one actor who is guaranteed to recoup a blockbuster’s costs — he has largely avoided the gossip magazine circuit and has never, as far as I know, invited Hello! into his lovely home. Even more telling, though, is that the most profitable movies of the summer that weren’t sequels starred largely unknowns, such as 300 and Knocked Up, neither of which feature actors who come with the £10m-plus price-tag sported by Clooney and his peers, surely much to the studios’ relief. Which suggests that we now have two levels of actors: those the public want to see act in movies, and those who are just there to act up in Grazia.

Guardian