(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 16 November 2025 17:45, UK
Glen Powell has become one of the leading A-listers in his age bracket, but he’s chosen not to rely on franchises to build his star persona.
An unusual shift that’s occurred within the last decade of Hollywood filmmaking is that characters and franchises have become more important than actors. While there used to be a way for stars like George Clooney or Denzel Washington to sell a film purely based on their involvement, the market has become rougher for original projects.
Case in point: the alumni of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Captain America franchises cruised to being global smash hits, but Chris Evans wasn’t greeted as warmly when Red One and Honey Don’t bombed. Similarly, the goodwill that Chris Hemsworth earned from being Thor didn’t prevent Blackhat and In the Heart of the Sea from flopping.
It’s this dichotomy that has made Glen Powell think twice about signing up to play an MCU character, as he’s already found a way to choose more interesting projects that he believes in. In a short window, Powell helped revitalise the romantic comedy genre with the smash hit Anyone But You and scored a co-writing credit with Richard Linklater on Hit Man, which earned him a nomination from the WGA awards.
It might’ve been easier for Powell to say no to Marvel, especially given the franchise’s recent run of flops – Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels, and Captain America: Brave New World haven’t exactly done them any favours. Still, fair play to him, he also had the sense to turn down a reboot of the Jason Bourne series, which, to be fair, has rarely put a foot wrong at the box office.
Powell revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that he has a process of “choosing where you’re going to make an audience happy and where you’re going to make yourself happy,” which may explain why he didn’t want to play a role when he would inevitably be compared to Matt Damon. However, this hardest philosophy has also meant that Powell has turned down franchises with which he has a personal connection, including Jurassic Park.
“Jurassic is one of my favorite movies,” he told the outlet. “It’s one of the things I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I’m not doing that movie because I read the script and I immediately was like, ‘my presence in this movie doesn’t help it.’”
Powell correctly predicted that “the movie’s going to fucking kill,” as Jurassic World Rebirth coasted to over $850million at the global box office, easily beating other summer titles like The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Superman, and F1.
However, the film was also stung with the criticism of being another derivative sequel with interchangeable human characters. Even if Jurassic World Rebirth featured the likes of Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali, it’s pretty clear that audiences were showing up to see the dinosaurs.
The speed at which Hollywood churns out sequels and reboots means that it’s inevitable that Powell would find himself in a couple of franchise films, but he’s managed to carefully select projects that could use “his presence”.
Despite a supporting role in Top Gun: Maverick, Powell was hailed as the film’s standout and a potential air-apparent to Tom Cruise. Twisters similarly allowed him to play a suave hero with the same blue-collar charisma of Bill Paxton in the 1996 original.
Powell is set to appear in a couple of exciting original films, including a new JJ Abrams science fiction adventure and a black comedy co-starring Margaret Qualley. Should they be successful, these films will be credited to Powell’s star power with no asterisks required.
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