How Jim Carrey’s ‘The Cable Guy’ changed the movie industry forever
By the time the mid-1990s swung around, Jim Carrey was seriously big business. He enjoyed one of the finest years in the entertainment industry in 1994, a time when he starred in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber, each of which were box office smashes and were at one point or another top of the movie charts, making Carrey a household name.
Two years later, Carrey suffered something of a critical blip, though, with the Ben Stiller-directed comedy The Cable Guy, in which Carrey played a lonely and bitter cable TV installer who menacingly enters the life of one of his customers, played by Matthew Broderick. The role was something of a departure from the kind of characters Carrey had become associated with, and it wasn’t well received by audiences or critics upon release.
However, as is often the case with critically murky movies, The Cable Guy was an absolute box-office smash and further cemented Carrey’s position as one of the most bankable acting stars in Hollywood. There’s an interesting commercial facet surrounding the 1996 movie, too, as it was a watershed moment in how movies would go on to be produced.
With The Cable Guy, Carrey, who’d already proven his commercial viability with his bumper year of 1994, became the first actor to earn $20million for his performance, a staggering amount considering the total budget for the film was only $47m. However, given Carrey’s stardom, this was obviously a gamble that the studio was willing to take.
Carrey’s previous efforts had huge box offices, which made the acting fees somewhat paltry in comparison. Naturally, Carrey deserved the $20m he would certainly make back for the studio, but he and other actors in the industry began to question the kinds of profits the studios were making off the back of their particular audience pulling power.
This time around, with The Cable Guy, Carrey had written into his contract that along with the $20m appearance fee, he would also receive 15% of the total profits of the movie. This soon became an industry standard, whereby actors would often sacrifice part of, if not all, of their fee in favour of receiving a percentage of the profits of the film, allowing the budget to go to other areas of production, making for a better film that would stand more a chance of commercial success.
Carrey would later repeat this formula with the 2008 film Yes Man, in which he decided to receive no salary, opting to take 36.2% of the backend profits instead. After the figures were calculated, he received around $30m, likely more than he’d have been given in the first place as an appearance dee. As stated, this method became more and more common, but in Carrey, interestingly enough, the money became no longer important to him and actually turned into something of a spiritual hindrance. But the movie industry would be forever changed.
