Why Orlando Bloom Never Became A Movie Star

Orlando Bloom was the first victim of a new normal in Hollywood where marquee characters (Legolas and Will Turner) in IP-driven franchises (Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean) were more valuable than the actors playing them.

Rod Lurie’s war actioner The Outpost will debut on VOD this Friday. Based on Jake Tapper’s non-fiction book The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, the immersive actioner tells of 53 soldiers battling 400 insurgents in north-eastern Afghanistan during a key moment in October of 2009 during Operation Enduring Freedom. It’s also one of the more high-profile leading roles we’ve seen from Orlando Bloom in a very long time. Bloom was an early victim of the “new normal” in Hollywood, one where an actor could rise to alleged stardom via a marquee character (or two) only to find audiences had no interest in him (or her) outside of the respective franchise. That was unusual in 2005, but in 2020, that’s stardom in a nutshell.

Bursting onto the scene as a relative unknown in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, his scene-stealing turn as Legolas was released concurrently with a supporting role in Ridley Scott’s ensemble war flick Black Hawk Down in late 2001. His comparatively low-key elf cut a stylish and sexy figure, especially when shield-surfing down a stairway shooting arrows at invading orcs in The Two Towers a year later.  That trailer-friendly moment, among other “Legolas kicks ass” beats” in the second Lord of the Rings movie, was popular enough that Jackson and friends inserted extra action sequences for the warrior elf in The Return of the King. Moreover, by the time Frodo threw the ring into Mount Doom, Bloom was a two-franchise man.

The first (and nearly footage-free) teaser for Walt Disney DIS ’s risky Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl debuted in front of The Two Towers in December of 2002, so it made sense that Orlando Bloom would get third-billing behind movie star Johnny Depp and Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush. To be fair, the story’s actual protagonist, Keira Knightley, was a relative unknown. Love Actually and Bend it Like Beckham would also debut in 2003. Curse of the Black Pearl was the surprise commercial and critical super-smash of summer 2003, earning $305 million domestic and $654 million worldwide on a $140 million budget. As The Return of the King became the second movie (after Titanic) ever to top $1 billion worldwide, Bloom was both Legolas and Will Turner.

On paper, Bloom’s next few star vehicles looked like the right choices and opportunities at which any young actor should have jumped. He played Paris in Wolfgang Petersen’s blockbuster adaptation of Troy, playing third fiddle (and every bit as cowardly as the source material would demand) to Brad Pitt and Eric Bana. The Warner Bros. film (which I kind of liked) earned mixed-negative reviews and just $133 million domestic, but it grossed a massive (especially for an R-rated movie at that time) $497 million worldwide in the summer of 2004. It also, frustratingly, earned pans for Bloom in what was another case of critics essentially criticizing an actor for playing an unsympathetic character unsympathetically (think, for example, Téa Leoni in Spanglish or Blake Lively in Savages).

Bloom headlined Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven that next summer, and yeah, when Ridley Scott asks you to star in his first big-scale action blockbuster since Gladiator, you say “Yes, yes I will.” The film was released in a compromised (but still pretty good) theatrical version, and I would argue too many of the reviews took it to task for not being Gladiator 2 and convicted Bloom’s thoughtful, cynical but non-vengeful protagonist of not being as conventionally heroic/badass as Russell Crowe’s Maximus. An R-rated “make peace not war” action epic set during the Crusades opening at the start of the second George W. Bush administration was always an uncertain bet. Its $218 million global cume (on a $130 million budget) was arguably the worst-case scenario for Fox.

If Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven wasn’t the next Gladiator, then Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown was most certainly not the next Jerry Maguire. The Orlando Bloom/Kirsten Dunst flick, concerning a young man dealing concurrently with a monumental professional failure and the unexpected death of his father, had the poor luck to arrive right as some of the genre tropes somewhat pioneered by Crowe were being both copied and analyzed under a more critical eye. Nonetheless, when the copy (Zack Braff’s Garden State in summer 2004) is better than the real thing, that’s a problem. A $52 million global gross on a $45 million budget, and (mostly justifiably) miserable reviews for Paramount PGRE ’s troubled, much-maligned and heavily-retooled coming-of-age dramedy meant Bloom’s second high-profile studio flop in a single year.

Just like that, even with two blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean sequels ($1 billion in 2006 and $954 million in 2007) on the horizon, Orlando Bloom’s days as a potential movie star and studio lead were over. On the plus side, after playing the straight-man hero in the Pirates and Lord of the Rings movies, Bloom finally got to overact and chew scenery as one of the villains in Paul W.S. Anderson’s steampunk version of The Three Musketeers. But that was his last wide release theatrical offering until he reprised his flagship roles as Legolas in two Hobbit prequels (Desolation of Smaug in 2013 and Battle of the Five Armies in 2014) and Will Turner in the fifth Pirates movie (Dead Men Tell No Tales in 2017).

Orlando Bloom still makes movies and is currently engaged to Katy Perry, so he has the whole “love and money” thing wrapped up. However, his fate would define the next generation of franchise-specific movie stars. Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pine, Chris Pratt and Chris Evans all broke out as specific marquee IP characters but, talent and charisma notwithstanding, had little-to-no luck getting folks to show up for, be they good or bad, conventional non-fantastical star vehicles. Orlando Bloom may go down as the first “modern movie star,” worth his weight in gold as the character that made him famous but commercially worthless in almost anything else. That’s the problem with trying to make the next Tom Cruise: There’s no longer commercial value in The Firm or Jerry Maguire.

To be fair, Bloom wasn’t quite as blisteringly charismatic a screen presence as Hugh Jackman. Jackman’s franchise-to-stardom success story as Wolverine in X-Men in the summer of 2000 sadly led to an entire generation of young white hunks being heralded as the proverbial next Tom Cruise in an industry that only wanted to cast them in Legend over and over again. But I digress, Bloom had two hugely successful franchises to his name, with marquee characters to boot, but he entered an industry where audiences were starting to only want to see a given movie star as a specific character. Even Russell Crowe would mostly struggle to open a star vehicle after Gladiator and today Cruise is only a sure bet as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible.

Bloom wasn’t the first actor to star in a high-profile franchise and not become a star out of it. Mark Hamill was unable to capitalize on Star Wars but built an illustrious voice-over career. While Jeff Goldblum was already famous and respected before Jurassic Park and Independence Day (and was never positioned as a conventional leading man). Heck, save for 1993 to 1997 (from Cliffhanger to Copland), Sylvester Stallone was/is only really a draw when playing Rocky Balboa or John Rambo. Yes, the ability to play straight-faced, sincere gee-whiz heroism is deeply underrated (Bloom and Brendan Fraser > Taylor Kitsch and Jake Gyllenhaal in this regard), the truth is that Bloom didn’t become a movie star in 2001 and 2003. Legolas and Will Turner did.