That was in no way unusual, because action stars like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme, and Steven "Adorable Hair" Seagal used to be some of the biggest stars in the world. But then something happened: The new millennium gave birth to the superhero genre, and suddenly having turbo muscles and a delightful name didn't matter as much anymore.

That sounds counterintuitive, because Marvel Studios' Chris collection is an assortment of enormous dudes, but the most popular character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr. Before Iron Man, the most financially successful superhero films were the Spider-Man trilogy, wherein Spider-Man was played by an in-shape (but by no means cybernetically biceped) Tobey Maguire. We don't need our action stars to look like alien gladiators anymore -- we just care about the character they're playing. To be fair, it certainly didn't hurt Guardians Of The Galaxy when Chris Pratt transformed from a dancing watermelon into Astronaut Freakzilla, but we would've loved him either way.

NBCUniversal Television Distribution
"They're called love handles for a reason."

The point is, audiences aren't paying to see Jackie Chan or Tom Cruise movies -- we're going out to see the new Captain America and Iron Man films. We won't even go see Robert Downey Jr. films, as Hollywood quickly discovered in the wake of Iron Man's success. You could argue that superhero movies are different, because the main characters wear identity-obscuring costumes, and the original Batman films rotated lead actors like a weirdly specific swingers party, but the same thing happened to movies where the main character doesn't wear a mask (incidentally, almost no member of the current slate of Marvel Studios movies wears a mask for longer than three minutes per film). Star recognition is no longer a deal-breaker for audiences. The Bourne Legacy dumped its titular character and lead actor, Matt Damon, and still killed it at the box office.

Universal Pictures
It's not clear if the tagline is talking about the characters or their plans for the series.

No doubt the same will be said about the upcoming Jason Statham-less Transporter film, starring some random bozo from Game Of Thrones. This isn't something that can be blamed on miserly studio heads not wanting to cough up the coin to keep actors from leaving franchises, either -- we as an audience have spent the past several years teaching them not to give a shit, because we go see the movies anyway. (Did anyone even notice that Shia LaBeouf left the Transformers series?) It's even affected salary and creative control disputes -- when Ed Norton hit a negotiation wall with Marvel about returning to play the Hulk in The Avengers, he was recast without a second thought, because Marvel knew their audience had an attachment to the Hulk and not Edward Norton. The same thing happened to Terrence Howard -- he was replaced by Don Cheadle for Iron Man 2 and 3 after he and Marvel couldn't reach an agreement over money.

There are always exceptions (Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Pratt are balls of charisma that are likely to be difficult to replace without upsetting audiences once their respective contracts run out), but there is an entire industry of professional wrestlers and MMA fighters (and even high school football stars) waiting in the wings to step in and take over The Transporter series for way less than Statham or the Game Of Thrones guy.

This is a big reason why ...

He absolutely went from "burly" to "inhuman Adonis," but Jackman didn't bulk up so much as eliminate almost all of his body fat before building up muscle. It's a trick first popularized during the shooting of Fight Club, when Brad Pitt's trainer realized that instead of building bulk, you could simply eliminate 100 percent of the actor's body fat to achieve the same "space lizard Hercules" look. This is how we went from barrel-chested Mr. Universes to tight-abbed superhumans, a look that is just as impressive yet relatively easy to obtain. Consequently, starving, washboard abs has to be a tool within reach on the resume of every mainstream actor if they want to maximize their career potential. Everyone needs to be able to climb aboard a superhero franchise at a moment's notice, because action-adventure is the biggest genre in the entire world.

This is somewhat ironic, considering that ...

And here's Jackie in The Spy Next Door (an American film):

Lionsgate

See the difference? The result of masking the action over many disorienting and fast-pace cuts ironically makes everything less exciting -- the impressiveness of the choreography is completely overpowered by the editor's seemingly short attention span. The obvious reason for this is that not everyone is Jackie Chan, so the cuts are used to hide stunt shots and boring choreography. But once you notice it, this phenomenon makes every modern action sequence as lackluster and weightless as watching an action sequence in a video game cutscene.

For example, the new Captain America has a great scene where he beats up a whole gaggle of buzzcut motheruckers in an elevator. Right away we know that Brooklyn Blondie will pummel his way to a daring escape (because he's Captain America and he's signed on for three more sequels), so the only relevant question is: How awesome will this be? But instead of witnessing an impressively choreographed elevator fight, we get 70 different editing cuts in the span of 70 seconds of fighting (not an exaggeration, we actually counted), resulting in a different shaky-cam angle for every one second of action. In the end, the scene is still fun, but nowhere near what it could have been.

Now, compare that to the hammer fight in 2003's Oldboy:

That fight sequence is so ass-blastingly off-the-chain that it took three days to get right. That's a boatload of really difficult work, but it ultimately paid off, as it is one of the more iconic modern movie fight scenes, made all the more impressive by the fact that it is a single three-minute shot, which required actor Choi Min-sik to perform all of the choreography without using a stunt double.

Speaking of which ...

Remember that impossibly shaky, million-shots-a-second action-scene editing technique we've been talking about? It all kind of started with The Bourne Identity, which is spectacularly ironic considering that Matt Damon trained for a freaking year to play Jason Bourne. Besides weapon training, he spent six months learning martial arts and another six learning to box. He took movement training to put himself in the mind of a man trained to kill. All for scenes that look like this:

Universal Pictures

Yep, Damon spent one whole year of precious, irrecoverable life practicing for fight scenes that we can barely see, when he could've been out getting drunk with Casey Affleck or something. It makes you wonder why an actor would bother honing their "wailing on other dudes" skills if the editors are just going to pave it over with high-octane bullshit later. Or if the audience even cares about actors doing stunts in the first place. Let's look at two recent examples of the elegant art of Russian-punching: The Equalizer and John Wick:

Columbia Pictures, Summit Entertainment
These films killed more Russians than World War II.

I audibly enjoyed both of these films in theaters. Coming out within a month of each other, both plots were generally the same: An aging ex-killer gets thrown back into the game after violently insane Russians wrong an innocent friend. In The Equalizer it's the beating of a teenage Chloe Grace Moretz, and in John Wick it's the murder of his adorable puppy. If I had to graph a moral ratio, one beaten teenager seems more or less on par with a tiny dog skeleton.

There's only two major differences in terms of how these films were made. One is that while both actors did their own stunts, only Keanu Reeves is the kind of scruffy maniac to push his body through 16 hours of arduous fight choreography for John Wick. The man is famously relentless when it comes to doing his own stunts.

Despite the fact that Keanu put way more effort into his role, the second difference between the two films is that John Wick made half as much money as The Equalizer, even though it carries a better rating than The Equalizer on Rotten Tomatoes.

Obviously there are a million reasons a movie might do better than another. However, the effort an actor puts in to make the action look believable is apparently not one of them.