Joe Russo picked Tom Holland as the last movie star — Beekeeper fans have a better answer
The counter-nomination arrived this week in the comments under a poster: a 59-year-old who shoots people in January.
Joe Russo spent last week telling CBR that Tom Holland is "the last great movie star," a man with a quality very few actors in history have had. Days later, Amazon MGM dropped the official poster for The Beekeeper 2, and the r/movies thread under it mounted a quiet counter-campaign for Jason Statham. The most upvoted sentiment wasn't about the poster at all:
"Every year in mid-January, there will be a new Jason Statham movie."
— a commenter on r/movies
The fans have a point worth taking seriously, because the two candidates are winning different contests. Holland's claim rests on Spider-Man: Brand New Day and its $2.5 billion — a colossal number earned inside a 64-year-old franchise, wearing a mask, with Sony and Marvel's machinery behind it. Statham's résumé is the opposite kind: The Beekeeper was an original script about a bee-themed assassin, sold on nothing but his face on the poster, and it made $162.6 million worldwide on a $40 million budget.
Brand New Day grossed $2.5 billion with Holland under a mask. The Beekeeper made $162.6 million on an original script and Statham's scowl.
The January fortress, fact-checked
The "every January" legend is off by exactly one year, and the exception is instructive. The real ledger:
- January 12, 2024: The Beekeeper opens MLK weekend, becomes a $162.6 million sleeper and a streaming monster afterward.
- March 2025: A Working Man skips January and still clears roughly $100 million worldwide — solid, softer than hoped.
- January 16, 2026: Mutiny was dated for this slot, then moved to August after A Working Man underperformed. In August it opened to $7.5 million in sixth place, not helped by Amazon accidentally publishing the full film on Prime Video days early.
- January 15, 2027: The Beekeeper 2 reclaims the exact MLK weekend, three years to the week after the original.
Read that sequence and the January slot stops looking like a running joke and starts looking like a strategy. Inside the slot, Statham prints money against zero blockbuster competition; the one time a Statham film wandered out of it into August, it drowned.
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The streak only Cruise matches
The second-most-upvoted claim in the thread — that Statham is "always getting a theatrical release for his movies" — survives scrutiny too, and the strongest evidence is who's paying for it. Amazon owns Prime Video, spent over $50 million on The Beekeeper 2's worldwide rights, and is putting it in cinemas anyway, with Miramax financing and Nobody 2's Timo Tjahjanto directing. Jeremy Irons, Emmy Raver-Lampman, and Jemma Redgrave's U.S. President all return, with Pom Klementieff, Yara Shahidi, and Adam Copeland joining a plot about Clay's own Beekeeper organization going rogue.
So the Russo question comes down to definitions. If a movie star is the person attached to the biggest numbers, it's Holland and the argument is over. If a movie star is the person whose surname alone is the entire marketing campaign — no universe, no mask, no pre-sold book — then the fans under that poster are naming the right man, and the January ticket is as close to a guaranteed purchase as moviegoing still offers.
Previously we wrote: Clayface is tracking like Madame Web (even its writer is keeping his distance)