By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES - Julia Roberts in the romance “Eat Pray Love” may not be outclassed. But she is definitely outnumbered.
Ms. Roberts is squared off against more than two dozen stars, including the governor of California, who are jammed into a pair of competing movies, “The Expendables” and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”
It might be coincidence. Or it might be a trend.
Either way, Hollywood of late has been serving up its leading men, leading ladies and principal supporting players in sizable clumps .
“Red,” an action picture; “New Year’s Eve,” a romantic collage; and “The Avengers,” with superheroes from Marvel, are group enterprises on tap for the future. “Grown Ups” and “Valentine’s Day” showed the power of ensemble in months past.
“There’s a much larger thing going on here,” said Robert J. Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University in New York State. He theorizes that feature film is reaching toward the complex, multicharacter scenarios that have made hits of sophisticated television series like “Mad Men” and “The Sopranos.”
Others are less sure.
“I don’t know that anything is changing” in terms of storytelling patterns, said Marc Platt, a producer of the cast-heavy “Scott Pilgrim.”
Even so, Mr. Platt said , falling star salaries and a declining number of films have made it easier to round up an ensemble. “A lot of actors want to go to work,” he said.
That was apparent at the Comic- Con International pop culture convention in July in San Diego, California, where Edgar Wright, the director of “Scott Pilgrim,” introduced a panel that included no fewer than 13 cast members, among them Jason Schwartzman and Anna Kendrick .
Bruce Willis, who is in “The Expendables,” also introduced “Red,” a spy romp with so many actors he appeared to lose count.
“I think over 75 movie stars are in ‘Red,’ ” said Mr. Willis, who was flanked by his “Red” co-stars Helen Mirren, Mary-Louise Parker and Karl Urban. They carried the flag for an ensemble that also includes Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Richard Dreyfuss and Ernest Borgnine.
Group film has had a long, rich history in Hollywood, from castladen classics like “Dinner at Eight” and “The Women” in the 1930s to star-filled disaster flicks like “The Poseidon Adventure” and “Earthquake” in the 1970s to the complicated roundelays of Robert Altman.
But large-cast films could seem slightly suspect in a culture that honored solitary heroes like Gary Cooper (“High Noon”) and Steve McQueen (“Bullitt”) in stories that put them at odds with the world.
“I don’t think the ensemble film has ever quite taken root in America,” the film historian David Thomson said by e-mail . “It goes too much against the grain of stardom and stories about ‘important’ people.”
If that is changing, said Mr. Thompson of the Syracuse center, the shift may have something to do with an increasing willingness by film studios to play demographic games that were once reserved for television.
“It gives you a palette with a lot more color,” he said, pointing out that a large cast allows marketers to add appeal across ethnic and generational lines - though sometimes at the expense of a story’s integrity.
Occasionally, Mr. Platt suggested, the sheer size of a cast, as with the “Ocean’s Eleven” films, may help create brand value in projects that are reaching for any way to distinguish themselves in a crowded entertainment market.
“It may not be that ‘The Expendables’ itself is a brand,” Mr. Platt said. But as the stars pile up, he said, “they might add up, in a certain way, to a brand.”
Still, the number of famous faces does not count for much if the films aren’t worth watching, as Roger Ebert, the longtime critic, observed .
“Cast size,” Mr. Ebert wrote, “has nothing to do with whether a picture is better or worse.”
