Why Kristen Stewart Could Be Great In A Super Hero Movie

Last night, we ran a story quoting Twilight  and Still Alice actress Kristen Stewart as saying that she would like to star in a superhero movie.

More particularly, she name-dropped Captain America, but frankly it sounded less like a specific wish list and more like the first one that came to her head:

"I love watching those movies," Stewart said. "I would love to show people that I can do more than just be 'Kristen Stewart' in a different movie, in a different circumstance."

Noting that she'd had some blockbuster experience in Snow White and the Huntsman, she added, "I'm sure I could get on board with Captain America, you know what I mean?… It would just have to be the right thing."

It's really no surprise: just about everybody who isn't already involved with a superhero movie wants to make one. For the most part, they've been guaranteed hits and the cast and filmmakers who are jumping on board the projects makes the working experience pretty great (for the most part). Stewart is just the latest in a line of people saying they're anxious to board the superhero train, including superstar multi-hyphenate Jennifer Lopez.

The comments thread was...not kind.

While out Twitter feed -- somewhat less insular to comic book readers and fans -- was split about 50/50 with retweets and responses either supporting or mocking Stewart, the comments thread here on the site went something like this:

That wasn't entirely unexpected; in the story, we noted that Stewart and the rest of the Twilight cast had done little to endear themselves to the Comic Con crowd over the years; their blockbuster film franchise created massive traffic issues every summer in San Diego and, in many cases, was accused of bringing such a different group of fans to Hall H that they were disrespectful and bored during other panels...which fans had to sit through in order to see Twilight since Comic Con doesn't clear the room after each presentation.

There's also just the general disdain for Twilight that a lot of geek culture has; its popularity among traditionally non-geek audiences made it a target for people who felt their territory was being threatened or at least trespassed on.

And, yeah, a lot of it is just not all that good, which plays a big part, too.

In any event, one of the things we like to do here at ComicBook.com is play Devil's advocate whenever too much of the audience is in agreement, just to see what kind of conversation we can provoke by offering a reasonable (if unpopular) alternate theory.

This time? Bring on Kristen Stewart. She'd fare fine in a Marvel or DC movie.

The reasons are fairly simple: Stewart is young, she's pretty and she's a box office draw.

She's also not nearly as bad an actress as many people believe, but we'll get to that.

The box office thing is probably the point that's most debatable, since she's had few major blockbusters since Twilight. After starring in Snow White and the Huntsman, which grossed about $400 million worldwide even with a disappointing $155 million domestically, she dove headlong into indie fare, apparently determined to prove her acting chops to a global audience that mostly knew her as a fairly cold, wooden character.

The success has been...mixed. She's certainly a passable actor even at her worst, but while she's drawn some pretty favorable reviews, they've all been for movies nobody saw. She may be convincing Hollywood and the critics who panned her in Twilight more than anybody else.

Which, of course, leads primarily to a lot of "why does she keep getting hired?" conversations among fans who aren't sold and don't see what Hollywood sees in an actor.

All that said, a $400 million take for a movie that nobody liked is a pretty respectable number, and she'd have been headlining a sequel to Snow White soon if her affair with the director hadn't made for embarrassing tabloid fodder while co-star Chris Hemsworth's appeal continued to rise unabated.

After that, yeah, she seems to have disappeared off the map in a lot of ways, but that's because her films have been smaller, more intimate and generally better-reviewed.

If you read between the lines, though, she's been surprising people for years with her ability to...y'know...act.

"She's an incredible actress,"Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice villain Jesse Eisenberg told Seventeen when he co-starred with her in 2009's Adventureland. "She's so funny, yet so realistic. I didn't expect that."

Emphasis ours.

Her performance in On the Road wasn't Best Actress quality, but she certainly stood shoulder to shoulder with everyone else in what was a solid ensemble and a fairly well-reviewed batch of performances. (Not the movie, mind you, the performances. Big difference in that case.)

She's also managed not to embarrass herself while acting opposite heavy hitters like Jodie Foster, James Gandolfini and, most recently, Julianne Moore, whose performance in Still Alice earned her a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.

Still Alice, in which Stewart plays the daughter of a woman (Moore) with early onset Alzheimer's, sees the 24-year-old doing a lot of the film's emotional heavy lifting and may well be the performance that finally convinces some people to forgive her for Twilight.

(For my money, Stewart's trademark underacting and Moore's overacting create a weird void between their performances that the movie fills perfectly with sorrow, awkwardness and ultimately affection. It's a relationship that shouldn't work on paper but because of the nature of the film it's kind of genius.)

And, to address the most common complaint: There's nobody out there who will say Stewart doesn't often fail to emote. In a superhero tentpole, particularly one where she isn't the title character, that's arguably not as big a deal as it has been in some of her previous work. 

Scarlett Johansson is one of the best young actresses in Hollywood, and the range she's been given the opportunity to play in Iron Man 2, Marvel's The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier is near zero. It's entirely believable that Stewart could have played at least 80% of those scenes as well as Johansson. Over at DC, they're giving solo films to Gal Gadot and Jason Momoa. Stewart would be just fine.

Both her bankability and her youth could help her net a superhero movie role if she were serious about pursuing one. Not only is she a recognizable face to put on a poster, but her audience is -- as we suggested above -- not the typical audience for this kind of film, meaning that she has the potential to bring in some audience crossover and expand the already-significant base for whatever superhero film she's in.

Her youth is important because one of the things that studios are starting to realize is that locking actors in for long-term, multi-picture deals isn't the only thing you've got to do; getting them while they're fairly young helps, too. Robert Downey, Jr. keeps re-signing contracts to return as Tony Stark and Iron Man...but there's quickly coming a point where an actor in his fifties who got hurt on the set of Iron Man 3 doesn't want to do a ton of action stuff.

At 24, Stewart could appear in three "phases" of Marvel films and still be younger than Downey was when he started as Iron Man.

So in short...yeah. Lots of worse things could happen than Kristen Stewart popping up in a superhero franchise. She's not perfect by a long stretch, but she's far better than she gets credit for and at the end of the day she's an asset to whatever film she's in more often than not. 

That's not to say you can't root for her to join a franchise you don't care for, of course...!