SHOW ME THE MONEY
Hollywood’s highest paid actors revealed with just 2 women in top 10 & biggest earner an unlikely dad on £1m a WEEK
And stars give their thoughts on the Hollywood gender pay gap
IF there was one star who the banks of photographers didn’t want to miss at the Oscars in March, it was Margot Robbie in her fabulous Versace dress.
The Australian actress had not only starred in 2023’s biggest box office hit, Barbie, but also produced it.
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Yet she didn’t receive the biggest Hollywood pay cheque of last year, as she was out-earned by comic Adam Sandler — who was not even popular enough to get a movie in the top ten highest- earning releases.
So it is perhaps not surprising that Basic Instinct legend Sharon Stone has voiced her anger about the gender pay gap.
Yesterday we told how she had complained that men who “frankly no one has ever heard of” had been offered 14 times her fee for a role in the same film.
Of the current top ten movie earners, only two are women — Margot, and Jennifer Aniston.
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But with the Barbie star earning $59million, second only to Adam Sandler’s $73million and ahead of Tom Cruise on $45million, there are some signs of improvement.
Three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep said recently: “There is some progress. The biggest stars in the world are women right now, although Tom Cruise is probably way over the top.”
Her comments followed reports that Cruise’s 2022 blockbuster sequel Top Gun: Maverick had earned him a reported £78million.
Adam Sandler’s crowning as the cash king of Hollywood is equally spectacular.
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To Taylor’s surprise, the studio said yes to $1m
According to financial magazine Forbes, he earned $1.4million a week last year, largely due to his production company Happy Madison signing a four-movie deal with Netflix in 2020.
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But Murder Mystery 2, in which he starred with Jennifer Aniston, performed poorly on the streaming platform, just scraping into the top 40 most viewed releases between January and June 2023.
On these pages we list 2024’s highest-paid actors, according to Forbes magazine.
But it wasn’t always the men who topped the Hollywood pay chart.
The first actor to secure a million-dollar pay cheque was British film idol Elizabeth Taylor.
She wasn’t keen on taking the title role in the 1963 epic Cleopatra, and was advised to ask for what was then an astronomical sum.
To her surprise, the studio said yes.
Many critics questioned whether anyone was worth $1million, but in the words of Taylor, who died in 2011 aged 79: “If someone is dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture I’m certainly not dumb enough to turn it down.”
Even in the early days of cinema, before the talkies, actresses were keeping up with the men.
In 1915 Charlie Chaplin signed a deal worth $10,000 a week, and a year later Mary Pickford, the Canadian star known as America’s Sweetheart, got the same.
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That all changed with the advent of the blockbuster.
Studio bosses wanted sequels to money-making behemoths such as Indiana Jones, The Terminator, Rambo and the comic book superheroes.
And they were willing to pay astronomical sums to make sure the films’ male stars returned to make yet more of them.
Will Smith was paid $100million for Men In Black 3 in 2012 and Robert Downey Jnr $75million for returning as Iron Man in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War.
In Hollywood’s top ten most extravagant pay cheques of all time there is only one woman — Sandra Bullock, who defied the pay ceiling on 2013 sci-fi thriller Gravity with an out-of-this-world $70million.
The key to narrowing the gender pay gap will be giving women more blockbuster roles and more power behind the scenes.
Undoubtedly, Margot Robbie will be able to name her fee if Barbie 2 gets made.
She received the same basic pay cheque as her male co-star Ryan Gosling for making the first film — $12.5million.
But because it was her production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, which got the movie green-lit, she earned a decent slice of the profit from the $1.4billion it grossed at the global box office.
However, Margot is an exception in the largely male-dominated studio system.
Stats out this year from The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University revealed that only 21 per cent of producers are female.
The disparity is even worse for directors, with just 16 per cent women, and writers at 17 per cent.
Significantly it is predominantly male producers who hire the cast and negotiate pay when a film is made.
There was outrage when Barbie’s female director Greta Gerwig was not nominated for an Oscar.
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But then it may have had something to do with the fact that membership of the Oscars organisation, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is 67 per cent male.
Even this year’s Oscar-winning actress Emma Stone, whose film Poor Things made $117million worldwide, is not in the top ten earners.
Long-established actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck both earned more, even though Air, their film about Nike trainers, didn’t do as well at the box office.
Also in the top ten are Jason Statham and Leonardo DiCaprio, each on $41million, and Denzel Washington with $23million.
But Brit Jason, 56, did have four movies out in 2023, including hits Meg 2, Fast X and the fourth Expendables film.
Emma Stone is not the only actress who is angry at the pay gap.
Earlier this year Olivia Colman said: “I’m very aware that if I was Oliver Colman, I’d be earning a f*** of a lot more than I am.
“I know of one pay disparity which is a 12,000 per cent difference. Do the maths.”
In September Jennifer Lawrence, whose co-star DiCaprio was reportedly paid £4million more than her for making the satire Don’t Look Up last year, said: “It doesn’t matter how much I do. I’m still not going to get paid as much as that guy, because of my vagina.”
In 2014 leaked emails revealed she was paid less than Jeremy Renner, Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale when they made 2013 crime comedy American Hustle together, even though she was the star of the box office smash The Hunger Games.
The extent of the problem was clearly illustrated by the row over the reshooting of scenes in thriller All The Money In The World in 2017.
It was reported that Mark Wahlberg got more than $1.5million for doing the same work as co-star Michelle Williams — who got just $1,000.
There is already sure to be a disparity in this year’s wage winners.
Dune 2, 2024’s second-biggest box office hit, supposedly paid male lead Timothee Chalamet $3million, while female lead Zendaya got $2million.
Those sums will be dwarfed by Ryan Reynolds whether or not his film Deadpool And Wolverine opens as a hit this weekend.
His basic pay for writing, starring in and producing the superhero blockbuster will top $25million.
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But when he made the first Deadpool, the canny Canadian negotiated a share of its profits.
If Ryan has repeated that trick, he can buy himself a few more Wrexham FCs.
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