The concept of “movie stars” is currently far removed from past connotations, but there are still certain celebrities for whom it still applies. George Clooney fits squarely into that group. The Oscar-winner may have broken into the mainstream on network TV with ER, but has spent much of the past 30 years appearing in myriad big-screen features like the 2025 Netflix release Jay Kelly, and all without ever falling pretty to Hollywood stereotyping.
Given Jay Kelly’s focus on an aging actor forced to reflect on his life and career balance, it makes sense that Clooney himself has an insight or two into his own successes. During an appearance on CBS Sunday Morning, Clooney attributed the breadth of his filmography to the fact that he hasn't headed up any gargantuanly successful franchises. As he put it:
I have had a tremendous amount of success, but not over-the-top success, not the multi-billion dollar franchises. You know, the Ocean's films were big, but a lot of my successes were doubles. Michael Clayton, it cost $12 million, and we brought in like $90 million, right? But it's a great film.
To his point, Clooney has delivered the goods in a slew of movies that were inarguable hits in the way that they delivered impressive profits for modest budgets. Without any of those projects taking over the box office in rankings-changing ways the way that MCU films, James Cameron's Avatar movies, or Star Wars movies have. Yeah, he was Batman, but for 1997's Batman & Robin, which grossed $107 million domestically against an estimated $125 million budget.
I'd suspect that George Clooney would be just as grounded and charming within a Marvel project or even a Mission: Impossible entry as he is the Coen brothers' movies, in romantic roles, or even in more serious fare such as The Ides of March or The Midnight Sky. But it doesn't seem like that's where he wants to put his efforts, so there's no reason to even picture what it would be like.
He continued, pointing out that staying below that particular radar is what's given him the opportunities to keep making more of those. As he put it:
So if you do those a few times - Up In the Air, the same thing; Descendants, the same thing - because it hasn't been massively successful, you don't get pigeonholed into 'Well, you can only do comedy,' or 'You can only do drama.' Because of it, I've been allowed to do O Brother and Syriana, and that's a great sense of fun for me, that I'm not stuck in that.
Of course, if Clooney were downright awful at acting within comedy, drama, action, sci-fi or any other genres, that might have also had a drastic effect on the kinds of offers that came in. But no, he's pretty solid through and through, regardless of what kind of movie he stars in. He can make you laugh, make you cry, and convincingly punch someone out after a car chase, and all without being "the car chase guy."
Few might expect to see genre-specific stars such as Jean-Claude Van Damme or Sylvester Stallone headlining a methodical biopic like Good Night, and Good Luck or a goofy throwback football comedy like Leatherheads, but those are projects that Clooney both starred in and directed. He shared that despite not reaching skyscraping levels of financial success, this is a better life for him than anything more limited. In his words:
I don't feel like my career hasn't worked out. I feel like I'm doing fine. But a big part of it as an actor is that I get to do stuff that a lot of actors don't get to do, because they got famous doing an action film, so they're an action star. They got famous doing comedy, so they can't do drama. And I didn't have those kinds of massive successes. So I'm the beneficiary of hitting doubles instead of, you know, hitting them out of the park.
Look at this guy. I just brought up his football movie and he's using baseball metaphors to describe his career. He can't even be pigeonholed with sports references!
Sounds like he's trying to take another crack at a cool billion both on-screen and off, with active development happening for Ocean's 14, which is set to bring Andy Garcia back in, and tentative plans to start filming in late-summer 2026.
