The New Male Body Ideal Breaks from the Superhero Standard
Dwayne Johnson’s dramatic slim-down and Austin Butler’s precise muscle gain raise the question of what the male body ideal really looks like today
The new male body standard in Hollywood
At the Venice Film Festival, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson stepped onto the red carpet with a body that looked unfamiliar to almost everyone watching. For decades, Dwayne has been the cultural shorthand for hyper-masculinity: a body designed for spectacle, sculpted in the image of superheroes and professional wrestlers. This week, though, he appeared visibly leaner, almost studious in a gray double-breasted suit and wire-rimmed glasses. Fans called it a transformation. Critics called it a reinvention. Either way, it looked like a recalibration of the male body ideal.
The change is not cosmetic alone. Dwayne slimmed down deliberately, after bulking up to portray MMA fighter Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine, a role that demanded a different physical vocabulary. Gone are the densely packed muscles of Black Adam, the comic-book body that required obsessive calorie counts, sodium manipulation, and months of hypertrophy training. What remains is a physique still powerful but closer to functional, less caricature and more human. For Dwayne, now 53, it is also a statement: that strength can be defined differently.
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At the same time, elsewhere in Hollywood, Austin Butler has been moving in the opposite direction. Known for a certain willowy charm with angular cheekbones and an Elvis drawl that never seems to have left him, Austin has now become the subject of viral before-and-after posts.
For his role in Enemies, a cat-and-mouse thriller opposite Jeremy Allen White, Austin underwent fourteen weeks of intensive training under Roy Chan, a Los Angeles-based trainer who devised the “Roydian method.” The plan was not bulk for bulk’s sake but a sustainable system built on functional workouts, mobility routines, and a diet grounded in whole foods and recovery. Austin’s results, lean muscle and a shredded core, were striking for the aesthetic and the philosophy: the body as durable rather than disposable.
Rethinking the male body ideal
These two transformations, Dwayne’s slimming and Austin’s sculpting, point to a question that Hollywood, and by extension pop culture, now seems to be asking in earnest: what does the male body ideal look like in 2025?
For much of the last twenty years, the answer has been simple and singular: big. From the Marvel Cinematic Universe to fitness influencers, the default image of masculine beauty has been hypertrophy, veiny arms, and torsos drawn with a black marker. The “superhero body” became so standardized that actors often revealed punishing regimens behind their transformations. That body, impressive as it was, carried a sterility, a sense of something engineered and even chemically assisted.
But what Dwayne and Austin both suggest is that the archetype is fracturing. The Rock’s weight loss is not just aesthetic but narrative, part of an attempt to embody a character who cannot be played as a marble statue. Austin’s shredded frame, meanwhile, is the product of a methodology that insists on longevity and recovery. Both moves resist the steroidal excess of the last decade and suggest a recalibration toward functionality.
The countercurrent of softness
There is also the countercurrent of softness: the ascendance of “sad boys” and “soft boys,” men like Timothée Chalamet or Paul Mescal, whose allure depends on vulnerability. They exist in tension with the Dwaynes and Austins of the world, presenting another standard entirely, one where thinness and fragility become their own kind of desirable. What we are witnessing now is not one male beauty standard but several, overlapping and sometimes contradictory.
For audiences, this proliferation offers something liberating. Instead of a monolithic, impossible image of masculine perfection, there is space for variance: the slimmed-down Rock, the shredded Butler, or the gangly Chalamet. Muscles are not gone, nor is the pursuit of transformation. But the meaning of those transformations has shifted.
The Rock no longer embodies an exaggerated masculinity meant to intimidate; Austin’s abs are less about dominance and more about discipline. Even the act of gaining or losing weight, once framed as suffering for art, is increasingly narrated as a choice about health.
No singular standard
The body is still a billboard, this is Hollywood after all, but the message has changed. Where once the demand was for spectacle, the new ideal seems to ask for coherence: a body that makes sense for the role and the moment. In a way, the transformations of Dwayne and Austin capture the same cultural pivot that fashion has undergone in recent years, moving away from maximalism toward adaptability, and away from a singular definition of “male” toward the plural.
The new male beauty standard is, paradoxically, that there is no standard. It is a range, from the dainty glasses of The Rock to the foam-rolling recovery days of Austin, from the sadness of a soft boy to the discipline of a shredded one. Masculinity is no longer one body; it is a spectrum of them.
