Why the nice guys are winning in Hollywood

Affable types like Dwayne Johnson are rising in popularity

Blame Tom Hanks. For years, being a complete bastard was part and parcel of being an A-list actor. You played a character on screen, earned your salary, then went off and caused merry hell in your spare time. As long as your films were hits, people sucked it up. And then the drip-drip-drip of Hanks's affable persona went through the Hollywood landscape until finally, the internet caved in to him altogether.

By the time Hollywood noticed that social media was a fairly major part of marketing for their films, and clients, "Hanx" was already signing off charming, personal tweets, and popping up in other people's feeds as an example of someone just walking around doing really nice things: befriending taxi drivers, refunding fans who didn't like a film, photographing lost gloves.