The resurrection of Demi Moore and Pamela Anderson: Hollywood and its second chances

Jamie Lee Curtis said it best upon being nominated for her 2023 Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once: “I’m 64 years old. I’ve been an actor since I was 19. I made horror films and sold yogurt that makes you shit. I never thought I would hear my name at the Oscars.” This year, after winning the award and enjoying a career renaissance, Curtis is back in the headlines for her work on The Last Showgirl.

One of the prevailing narratives of this year’s awards season leading up to the Oscars has been that of the return to the limelight of beloved veteran actors who the public thought had disappeared for good. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, several mature performers and their agent put together campaigns year after year meant to reinvent their personas — the archetypal “I’m ready for my spotlight” moment. In 2025, that rallying cry, an expert blend of marketing and poetic justice, is being sounded by no one so much as Demi Moore, 62.

Upon being crowned Best Actress at the Golden Globes for The Substance, a film full of meta messaging that winks at her own treatment by Hollywood, Moore recalled the start of her career in a potent acceptance speech. “I’ve been doing this a long time — like, over 45 years — and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything as an actor […] I do belong.” A compelling narrative isn’t just necessary to take home treasured statuettes. It can also power yesterday’s stars toward a new career chapter, one that actually celebrates their age.

The sane people in Hollywood know perfectly well that the industry ran itself into the ditch, and not just on the woke stuff. The rise of the streamers coincided with both peak woke and peak sequel disease. What got shredded were intelligent, well written, lower and mid-budget adult films. The movie business has always been youth oriented, but adult audiences traditionally turned out in sufficient numbers to support thoughtful character dramas starring older actors. Those did not disappear entirely, but a lot of that action shifted to relatively low budget independent films that didn’t get much promotion or extended theatrical runs.

It’s been obvious for a couple of years that at least some of the big players are trying to correct course. Alienating half the potential viewing audience in pursuit of ideological festishism is suicidal. I haven’t seen the Demi Moore and Pamela Anderson movies mentioned in this article, but I will cautiously applaud what seems to be a conscious effort to appeal to older viewers.

Last year was disastrously bad, at least in part because it was still in the rain shadow of the 2023 strikes. Going forward, it’s partly a matter of getting front-end costs down so that they don’t need blockbuster attendance levels to break even. One of the things that encourages me is the number of big name actors who still give their time to serious, intelligently written adult films. It’s clear that the serious actors would actually prefer to act, as opposed to endlessly prancing around in spandex in front of blue screens or rehashing yet another action hero flick that depends on car crashes, explosions, and bad guys who all graduated from the Imperial Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship.

The question is whether adults will return to the theaters to support good movies. One of the complaints that surfaces regularly on FR is that the theaters have been overrun by rude, juvenile behavior that spoils the viewing experience. I’ve been making an effort to get out more in the last several years. I can assure you that you will not encounter that kind of behavior in a serious adult-oriented movie. The idiots are all down the hall watching the idiot bait movies. And I’m glad they are there. The idiot bait movies keep them out of the movies I’m interested in, and their attendance at least helps keep the theaters alive.

In my limited experience, there are a lot more adults coming out for serious movies than in recent years. Attendance has not yet rebounded to pre-covid levels, and the adult audience has now been conditioned to wait for streaming and then watch from home. But when the theaters first reopened after the covid shutdowns, there were often ten or fewer people in the theater for the serious adult movies. On several occasions, I was the only person there. We are well off those lows. If you go to the 3:00 p.m. Thursday showing, it will still be pretty sparse, but it’s recovering slowly.

The streaming disaster needs to be unwound. The streamers may do this to themselves, quite accidentally. They swallowed most of the legacy studios and assumed everything could be turned into streaming tv. That turned out to be a frontal assault on quality and a money losing strategy in the end. Now they are jacking up subscription rates, going all in on getting a piece of the major sports programming, bringing back commercials, reinventing what looks like traditional cable bundles, and requiring an expensive, higher tier subscription for no commercials and good picture quality.

The streamers are shafting consumers on every front. Cancel your subscriptions and get out to the theater to watch a good, intelligently written independent film.

We are approaching the point at which the only reason many people will have a streaming subscription is to watch the NFL and college football — and you’ll have to subscribe to three or four streamers to get complete coverage. The streaming execs have played us for chumps. Cancel ‘em.

“I made horror films and sold yogurt that makes you shit.”

Well, any corporation thinking about making her a product endorser is now on notice that she will trash talk the product a couple years down the road. Way to push your brand Jamie.

Reminds me of one of the most classless things I ever heard. I always knew Walter Cronkite was a worthless POS, but many years ago sometime back in the early 2000s, I was listening to Coast To Coast AM one night and they were talking about the space program and the Apollo missions. This was during the timeframe Art Bell and George Noori were tag teaming as hosts so I don't recall specifically which one it was, but I think it was Noori. Anyways, they brought Cronkite on as a guest to talk about what it was like to cover the space program and to broadcast the first lunar landing.

During the show, Noori did an ad spot for what was, at the time, one of the show's biggest sponsors. They came out of the ad break and it was very clear they were back on the air. Cronkite couldn't help himself and started viciously trashing the show's sponsor.

Completely uncool and way out of line for somebody who was supposedly a broadcast media superstar.

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