Glen Powell: The Global Economy’s Last Exportable Smile
Glen Powell: The Last American Smile Export in a World That’s Given Up on Grins
By Dave’s International Desk of Diminishing Returns
If nations traded on charisma futures, Glen Powell would be the bullish commodity every treasury wishes it had shorted five years ago. While Beijing hoards rare-earth metals and Brussels stockpiles bureaucracy, Hollywood has quietly cornered the market on Powell’s toothpaste-ad incisors and throwback jawline—a living, breathing trade surplus of optimism the rest of the planet can’t manufacture anymore.
From Lagos streaming cafés to Seoul’s neon multiplexes, audiences who’ve spent the last decade marinating in doom-scrolls and heat-index warnings are suddenly volunteering to sit through 124 minutes of American fighter-pilot propaganda simply because Powell winks like a man who still believes tomorrow’s brunch is achievable. That’s soft power you can’t sanction.
Consider the numbers. Top Gun: Maverick—essentially a two-hour recruitment ad for a country that can’t reliably keep its own airlines aloft—cleared $1.5 billion globally, powered largely by Powell’s R-rated volleyball scene and a grin that sold the illusion that the U.S. still makes things that don’t explode. In France, where cynicism is the national sport, the film out-grossed the latest Asterix, prompting Le Monde to lament “la fin de la culture européenne, remplacée par des abdominaux texans.” Translation: even the French are paying to watch abs do diplomacy.
Meanwhile, Powell’s recent rom-com Anyone but You has become Australia’s highest-grossing domestic film ever, which is staggering for a country whose previous cultural apex was a knife-wielding bogan in a leather vest. Aussies claim the film’s success is due to Sydney’s scenery; international analysts suspect it’s Powell looking like the last man on Earth who still says “ma’am” without irony.
Of course, the world’s embrace of Powell isn’t pure affection—it’s triage. Europe is too busy reheating cold wars, Asia is locked in semiconductor cage matches, and South America is auctioning off rainforests for bus fare. Into this vacuum strides a 35-year-old Texan who appears physically incapable of frowning, offering the planet a two-hour visa to a timeline where the biggest worry is whether your wingman will make it to happy hour. It’s escapism as foreign aid, delivered in IMAX.
Behind the scenes, the machinery is predictably cynical. Streaming algorithms from Mumbai to Manchester have identified the “Powell coefficient”: every 0.7 seconds of screen-time smile equals a 3.2% spike in viewer retention. Netflix executives in Amsterdam now run neural nets to determine the optimal cheek-dimple depth for non-U.S. markets. Somewhere, a Dutch data scientist is getting paid in stroopwafels to quantify hope.
Yet the actor himself keeps insisting he’s just a “regular guy from Austin,” which is precisely what a regular guy would say if his regular hometown had recently gentrified into a theme park for tech bros. Still, Powell’s practiced humility is catnip to regions allergic to American bombast. When he bowed—actually bowed—on a Tokyo red carpet, Japanese headlines declared “Finally, a Yankee Who Knows Shame.” That’s diplomatic progress you can’t buy at Davos.
There is, naturally, a ticking clock. Hollywood has already dispatched scouts to clone the Powell archetype: symmetrical men who can bench-press a franchise and apologize in three languages. But charisma isn’t a rare earth; it’s more like helium—abundant until it isn’t, and then suddenly every balloon at the party deflates. Analysts warn that if global temperatures rise another 1.5°C, the demand for frothy escapism will exceed supply, leading to black-market rom-coms filmed in abandoned Arctic resorts.
For now, though, the export holds. From Riyadh’s newly legal cinemas to Ukrainian metro bomb shelters running pirated DVDs, audiences cling to Powell as proof that somewhere, someone still irons his shirt before saving the day. It’s not sustainable, it’s not nutritious, but it’s what we’ve got—an airborne contagion of nice in a world overdosing on reality.
And so the planet keeps buying tickets, praying the grin lasts longer than the ice caps. Because if Glen Powell ever stops smiling, the markets might finally crash for good.
