At least around here, Robert deNiro is considered the ‘star’. Second place, Al Pacino. [I’m talking acting capabilities] My choice would be John Cusack and even - yes, wait for it…- Kevin Bacon [the last one being ridiculed over the game with the same name, but a good actor nonetheless, imo]
Let’s not forget that little arthouse movie Gladiator.
Also, Sam Jackson has been in a sursprisingly large number of blockbusters. Boxofficemojo.com, mentioned above has inflation adjusted gross figures listed by actors. It’s interesting to note that while T Cruise is big, Harrison Ford still beats him, appearing in movies grossing over $3 bill, by that beating Cruise with about $800 million. Lest anyone think this is all Indy Jones and Han Solo, let me remind you that three of his movies in the past ten years, ‘What Lies beneat, Air Force One’, and in 1994, ‘Clear and present danger’, earned the producers around $450 mill.
Mel Gibson is up there, around the $2 bill mark and Tom hanks comes in second, squeezing by Cruise and reaching $2.7. Even Eddie Murphy passes Cruise, but his hits are mostly in the past, though he still had 6 movies grossing more than $100 mill in the last ten years, the highest grossing being Shrek. As far as I can tell, the top five are:
Harrison Ford
Tom Hanks
Eddie Murphy
Tom Cruise
Jim Carrey
Hanks has had 9 movies passing the 100 million mark in the past ten years, in fact, the only one under that mark is his own ‘That thing you do’ which makes him the most consistent box office draw of the lot.
I don’t think you’re giving Kevin Dean enough credit. That’s got to be at least a 14 incher he’s got dangling here - Kevin Dean
Jack Nicholson should be on some of these lists.
Somewhere I read that because Jackie Chan is the biggest star in Asia, he is the biggest star in the world. If that is true, close the thread because the Estilicon has, once again, provided the answer 
George Clooney is a pretty big name around Hollywood.
Just a reminder: the OP talked about Tom Cruise being today’s biggest male star.
Harrison Ford and Jack Nicholson and the like may have been contenders once, but for today’s box office they’re old news.
And Orlando Bloom will only become a star when he headlines a movie that makes over $100 million. Right now he’s Tony Randall.
I agree about Bloom, but not Ford, and especially not Tom Hanks. While Ford’s biggest grossing hits belong in the 80’s, he’s still pulled in about as much as Georgy Clooney has during the past ten years. His days as a megastar might be gone, but he’s still a solid box office draw.
Orlando Bloom’s only there because he’s been in four of the biggest hit movies of the past five years. They were not Bloom vehicles though.
If you sort the list that Waenara provided by # of $100,000,000+ movies it comes out like this.
1 Tom Hanks 13
2 Harrison Ford 11
3 Tom Cruise 10
4 Mel Gibson 10
5 Eddie Murphy 10
6 Samuel L. Jackson 9
7 Robin Williams 8
8 Jim Carrey 8
9 Steve Buscemi 7
10 Morgan Freeman 7
11 John Travolta 7
12 Arnold Schwarzenegger 7
13 Will Smith 6
14 Tommy Lee Jones 6
15 Jack Nicholson 6
That seems like a pretty good list although Buscemi hasn’t really been the Star of any movies that I can think of.
I wasn’t ENTIRELY serious about Adam Sandler being one of the 3 biggest stars in Hollywood. I mentioned him in part to be a wiseacre and provacateur (his name seems to provoke outrage in some quarters!).
Still, it’s worth noting that, like him or not, people who buy a ticket to an Adam Sandler movie are DEFINITELY paying to see Adam Sandler do his schtick. Adam Sandler is the only reason people paid to see “Big Daddy,” “The Wedding Singer” and “Mr. Deeds.”
Now, Will Smith has been in several very successful movies, and is an appealing actor. But is he the main reason people went to see “Independence Day”? Is Ben Affleck the primary reason people went to see “Armageddon”? Is Orlando Bloom (good-looking and talented though I agree he is) the primary reason people went to “Pirates of the Caribbean” or any of the LOTR trilogy?
No, to all those questions. Many actors who are, on the surface. more popular than Adam Sandler, have been successful only/primarily in ensemble movies or special effects-driven films, and had little or nothing to do with their films’ success (Jeff Goldblum starred in two “Jurassic Park” movies and in “Independence Day”- blockbusters all, but does anyone think he’s a huge star?).
For that matter, we can pose the chicken-and-egg question for most big stars. Was “Saving Private Ryan” a smash because Tom Hanks was in it? Or did Steven Spielberg simply give Hanks the lead role in a film that was sure to be a smash, with or without him? Are Tom Cruise’s movies hits because people love him, or does he get a disproportionate number of good scripts in the mail because studios perceive that people love him?
Only a few actors draw big crowds on their own. Adam Sandler is one of them. Of course, MOST of those actors only draw big crowds in a particular type of film. Sandler and Jim Carrey draw huge crowds to their lowbrow comedies, but who went to see “Punch Drunk Love” or “The Majestic”? Tom Hanks is irresistibly popular in romantic comedies and quite popular in conventional action or dramatic films… but very few people want to see him as a hit man (“Road to Perdition”) or a thief (“The Ladykillers”). And while people generally like Tom Cruise, they don’t usually want to see him deviate from his standard persona (“Vanilla Sky” and “Eyes Wide Shut” weren’t bombs, but they weren’t hits, either).
Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks are pretty much the biggest male stars, in my view, because they’re the actors best able to draw big crowds on their own. People will crowd theaters on the opening weekend just to see one of the Toms, even if they know little or nothing about the movie they’re in. But once people catch on that Cruise or Hanks is doing something out of the ordinary, the crowds tail off quickly.
OK, I can see that Mark Hamill would be up pretty high, thanks to Star Wars. But how is he two slots ahead of Harrison Ford? The original Star Wars trilogy had Han as well as Luke, and Ford went on to do a lot more afterwards. I know that Hamill is still making a respectable living doing voice work and such, but that’s gotta be less than Indiana Jones and the rest.
Orlando Bloom topping the lists also illustrates what I was saying about sharing credit. He was the fourth- or fifth-biggest male character, at best, in Lord of the Rings, and the second-biggest in Pirates of the Carribean, but he hasn’t been the number 1 man in anything yet (at least, not anything big).