Robert Downey Jr. ranked #1 on Vulture’s “100 Most Valuable Movie Stars”:

“Nearly unhireable a decade ago, this year Downey helped power The Avengers to that record-busting billion-and-a-half worldwide gross and ended up in the very top spot on our Most Valuable Stars list. Since his breakout performance in 2008’s Iron Man, Downey has made only one misstep (2009’s underperformingThe Soloist) and has managed to deliver seven huge hits. Three of them put him in the Iron Man armor, sure, but Downey’s got another franchise, Sherlock Holmes, which grosses more than half a billion worldwide with each installment, and his comic turns in Tropic Thunder and Due Date both crossed the $100 million mark domestically.

It helps that Downey is so like his most famous character thatIron Man 3 director Shane Black says, “He IS Tony Stark”; audiences clearly can’t get enough of either. Sober, savvy, and versatile (so much so that only Downey could pull off the part of an Aussie actor donning blackface in Tropic Thunder and snag an Oscar nomination for it), Downey’s engineered the biggest comeback that modern Hollywood’s ever seen, going from drug-addict joke to blockbuster king.

Let that be a lesson to some of this list’s more scandal-ridden subjects: There’s always a second (or third, or fourth) act to be had, if you’ve got the talent to pull it off.”

(Source: Vulture)