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Who is the most powerful director in Hollywood right now? Perhaps you’d opt for a clean answer: It’s the person whose latest movie started selling tickets a year ahead of time. But who’s the second-most powerful director in Hollywood? What about the third? The 23rd?
These are the questions that have occupied the Vulture offices for the better part of a year, since I first started mulling a list of the most powerful directors in Hollywood. As the industry exits an era of cinematic universes, when mega-producers like Kevin Feige ruled the land, directors seem to matter again. A new generation of cinephiles has come of age, raised on YouTube, Reddit, and Letterboxd. Having spent their youths under the hegemony of the MCU, they bristle at interconnected comic-book worlds the same way their forebearers in the ‘70s did at old-fashioned musicals. Our young stars feel the same way: When Timothée Chalamet devoted years of his life to prepping for a role, it was for a Safdie, not a superhero.
The balance of power has shifted, Puck’s Matt Belloni told me. It used to be that a figure like Pirates of the Caribbean’s Gore Verbinski, “a big-time commercial director,” was considered far more important to the industry than any Oscar-friendly auteur. “But because of the rise of film-fan culture, the communities built around filmmakers, that has given more power to the auteurs who can deliver an audience.”
