The actors who made $1 million per minute
It’s no secret that major stars are making big bucks. On the whole, the Hollywood film industry is worth over $42 billion, meaning that there is plenty of cash to play with. As films are regularly working with a multi-million dollar budget, big names know exactly what kind of cash they can be asking for.
When it comes to scoring big names for a film, the money on the table is always high. Obviously, some actors say yes based on passion alone, and some casting decisions are made easy when the actor and director are just as excited about bringing a movie to life. But for some blockbusters, it all comes down to numbers.
There are some stories of actors turning down eye-watering sums offered to them to star in a movie. Matt Damon turned down the highest when he said no to Avatar, a role that would have made him over $250million from a cut of the profits. Russell Crowe also walked away from an insane salary as he rejected Lord Of The Rings’ $100m offer.
But when it comes to actors who said yes, those numbers get even wilder. There are a select few actors that have well and truly racked it in as their salary approximated at a million dollars a minute for their screen time.
While sometimes Hollywood’s huge salaries feel worth it for the work that’s put in, there are cases when the cost far outweighs the effort. Some actors have gained huge profits for merely minutes-long cameos, such as Julia Roberts’ six-minute-long walk-on role in Valentine’s Day, for which she earned $3m.
Similarly, while Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter was striking, he actually only appears in Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice In Wonderland remake for around seven minutes. But still, he walked away with $68m, which is near-enough $10m per minute he was on the screen. It’s the same story for Jared Leto’s role as the Joker in Suicide Squad. While he was a notable part of the cast, his actual screen time was short. For seven or so minutes, he earned $7m, clocking in at precisely a million per minute.
When it comes to superhero movies, the budgets are always huge. Even for the smallest roles, they seem to bring in big names and use big numbers to coax them in. In 1978, Marlon Brando’s less than 20-minute-long role in Superman earned him over $19m thanks to his back-end cut of the profits. Robert Downey Jr earned an excellent payout, too. His role as Iron Man made him so notable in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that when it came to Spider-Man: Homecoming, they paid him $10m merely for a little show-up role of only eight minutes long.
The Star Wars franchise has a reported work of $70 billion, so they have plenty of cash to play with. Two stars got a significant payday for little work during the series. Alec Guinness earned $150,000 for his 20-minute-long role in the 1977 Star Wars, but his backend deal has earned him over $95 million over the years thanks to profit cuts.
Other names that have managed to secure $1 million a minute deals include George Clooney for his role in Gravity, Ving Rhames for his short cameo in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Will Smith’s return in Men in Black 3, which earned him over $100million. Eye-watering, enviable sums all around.
The actors who made $1 million per minute:
- Julia Roberts – Valentine’s Day
- Will Smith – Men in Black 3
- Johnny Depp – Alice In Wonderland
- Marlon Brando – Superman
- Alec Guinness – Star Wars
- Jared Leto – Suicide Squad
- Mark Hamill – Star Wars: The Force Awakens
- Ving Rhames – Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
- Robert Downey Jr – Spider-Man: Homecoming
- George Clooney – Gravity
