Five actors who were paid way too much
When certain actors reach the highest echelon of Hollywood, the riches on offer would make any regular Joe grind their teeth in frustration. After all, this is an industry in which people are regularly paid millions of dollars for playing pretend and attending glitzy premieres. It’s no wonder we mere mortals get jealous.
Of course, I’m being a little facetious here, and there is a lot more involved in any high-level movie star career than simply pretending for a living. However, it can’t be denied that, compared to everyday jobs that contribute infinitely more to society, some of the paydays actors take home can get pretty obscene.
This list will look at five great examples of actors who were paid far, far too much for their work, whether that is because the results were subpar, they were too lazy to truly earn the money, or their astronomical contracts set a dangerous precedent in the industry.
There are, of course, many more that could go on the list, as A-listers have been pocketing crazy sums for decades at this point. For example, Jack Nicholson made a cool $90million when he accurately predicted the ceiling on Batman‘s box office was a lot higher than anyone else did, and adjusted his contract accordingly.
However, a couple of the guys and gals on this list paved the way for Nicholson to cut such a profitable deal, and his performance as the Joker was so iconic that you could argue he may have deserved the money. Well, maybe some of it….
Five actors who were paid way too much:
Adam Sandler – $525 million+ (Netflix)
Adam Sandler hasn’t been in a theatrically released motion picture since the Safdie brothers’ nail-bitingly frenzied thriller Uncut Gems in 2019. Completely abandoning cinemas has worked out well for the ludicrously popular funnyman, though, and to his credit, he was way ahead of the curve when it came to recognising the rising dominance of streaming. In 2014, he signed an eye-watering $250m deal with Netflix to make four original movies for the service through his production company Happy Madison: The Ridiculous 6, The Do-Over, Sandy Wexler, and The Week Of.
Can anyone tell me what these films are, let alone whether they were any good or not? Probably not. However, Sandler then made Murder Mystery in 2019, outside this four-picture deal, and it was Netflix’s biggest original movie of the year. Suddenly, he re-upped in 2020 to the tune of $275m. So, for anyone keeping score, that’s $525m for nine movies, which is pretty nice work if you can get it.
It’s unclear exactly which films this deal entailed, but suffice it to say, Sandler has since made more than four movies for Netflix. The specifics on whether he has signed another four-picture deal aren’t publicly known, but it stands to reason that the amount Sandler has actually made from Netflix vastly exceeds that $525m. In truth, the sums Sandler has been pocketing from Netflix have been offensive for years, and are surely far, far too much for a guy who has almost exclusively been delivering guff like Hubie Halloween. (Although, admittedly, I did like the basketball drama, Hustle.)
Ryan Reynolds – $27 million (‘6 Underground’, 2019)
These days, many working actors claim the days of major movie studios forking out $20-$30m, for an A-list star to topline their film are largely long gone. The business of Hollywood simply doesn’t work that way anymore – unless, that is, you strike a lucrative deal with a streaming company. Streamers like Netflix, AppleTV+, and Prime Video don’t have to put their films in cinemas, you see, which means box office isn’t their driving force. However, because box office potential is sometimes enough to convince a big star to lower their salary in favour of a cut of the profits, the likes of Netflix often have to make much larger upfront deals than the average studio.
All this is to say, these vagaries of the modern movie marketplace have led to a few stars cashing in massively with movies that are instantly forgotten on streaming. For instance, did you know that the resolutely one-note Ryan Reynolds was paid an astonishing $27m to lead Michael Bay’s 6 Underground in 2019? That was legitimately the biggest upfront salary of the year, beating even the $20m Dwayne Johnson managed to fenagle from Universal for Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw.
To put this into perspective, Reynolds pocketed nearly three times the amount Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio were paid for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood ($10m), six times the payday Joaquin Phoenix got for Joker ($4.5m), and nearly 11 times the salary Jessica Chastain was paid for It: Chapter Two. These films mightn’t have all been good (I’m looking at you, Joker), but they were all commercial hits that people will remember. 6 Underground, by contrast, somehow managed the feat of being so rote and half-assed that I forgot what it was even called by the time the credits rolled.
Marlon Brando – $19 million (‘Superman: The Movie’, 1978)
Marlon Brando’s role as Jor-El, Superman’s Kryptonian father in Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie, is the poster child for actors being paid way, way too much. Before 1972, Brando was so unemployable that the Paramount Pictures chairman tried to ban Francis Ford Coppola from casting him in The Godfather. Coppola got his way, though, and Brando delivered an iconic turn as Don Corleone, putting him back on top in Hollywood. He followed that mob classic with the controversial Last Tango in Paris and the western The Missouri Breaks, before convincing Warner Bros to agree to a truly insane deal for Superman.
As hard as it may be to believe now, after decades of superhero dominance, in 1978, the studio suits were worried that audiences wouldn’t take their DC Comics adaptation seriously. So, they were keen to borrow some of Brando’s credibility and gravitas, and he saw them coming. In the end, he negotiated a salary of $3.7m plus 11.5% of the movie’s backend profits, all for only 13 days’ work and 20 minutes of screen time.
Unsurprisingly, this was the most astronomical deal any actor had ever been given at the time. However, it got even more ridiculous when the movie was a gargantuan hit, because that meant Brando walked away with a reported $19m. In today’s money, that’s roughly $94m, which is an even more astonishing sum when you consider Brando wasn’t even required to learn his lines. He simply read them from giant cue cards placed behind Donner’s cameras.
Will Smith – $100 million (‘Men in Black 3’, 2012)
Have you seen Men in Black 3? It’s not very good, bar Josh Brolin’s alarmingly pitch-perfect Tommy Lee Jones impression. Seriously, just watch some YouTube clips of him playing the young version of Jones’ stone-faced Agent K. It’s uncanny. Anyhow, aside from Brolin, the movie is a garden-variety sequel from the 2010s, in which a bunch of big stars cavort around in a lazily scripted, half-heartedly performed re-hash of former glories.
Luckily for star Will Smith, though, he recognised Sony was desperate enough for him to return as Agent J that he had the studio over a barrel in contract negotiations. So, to make it worth his while, he negotiated his standard $20m salary, plus a little sweetener: just the small matter of 12.5% of the film’s total gross. Yes, you read that correctly. Most actors in this situation tend to negotiate a percentage of backend profits from a film’s box office run, but for some reason, Sony was insane enough to give Smith a cut of the $654.2m gross in its entirety.
This is why, if reports are to be believed, Smith came away from Men in Black 3 with an eye-watering $100m: the highest single movie salary in Hollywood history. In the short run, Smith made out like a bandit, but in the long run, it might have cost him other sizeable paydays, because a year later, an anonymous source told The Hollywood Reporter, “His deal is an absolute impediment to making money for the studios.”
Elizabeth Taylor – $7.2 million (‘Cleopatra’, 1963)
If Brando is the poster child for actors making obscene sums for relatively little work, Elizabeth Taylor is the actor who paved the way for movie star salaries becoming obscene in the first place – and she did it by half-jokingly suggesting 20th Century Fox pay her $1m to play Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt. The year was 1959, and such an amount had never been an inkling in the mind of even Hollywood’s biggest stars. But, egged on by her pal Burt Reynolds, Taylor decided to chance her arm, because she knew the studio wanted her badly for the film.
In 2015, Reynolds claimed to People magazine that Taylor asked for his advice in the matter. “What am I going to do?” she supposedly asked. “Those bastards want me to make this movie, and I don’t want to make it.” With a shrug of the shoulders, Reynolds claimed he suggested, “Well, then, ask for a million dollars.” The Smokey and the Bandit star alleged he then heard Taylor scream in delight when she negotiated on the phone in the next room, before returning to him to beam, “I got it. They’re going to give it to me!”
Accounts vary as to what Taylor eventually made on Cleopatra, which was a notoriously long, expensive, and torturous shoot. But one thing is for certain, it was a lot more than $1m. In fact, some reports say that she walked away with $7m thanks to negotiating hard for 10% of the box office gross, plus lucrative overtime payments when the film went over time and over budget. This $7m total is worth around $74m in 2025, which is a mind-boggling sum, especially when you consider it was unheard of at the time.
To her credit, though, at least she worked harder for her money than Brando!
