Who was the first filmmaker to become a billionaire?
No one becomes an artist to get rich, but in Hollywood, the line between art and business can be conveniently blurry. If you make a box office smash and happen to have negotiated a share of the profits or control of potential sequels and merchandising rights, you’re going to make a tidy sum of cash at the end of the day. Plus, having that success on your CV is going to put you in the perfect position to negotiate a higher salary for your next project.
There are plenty of filmmakers who have made a lot of money in Hollywood, but even more of them have made less than you might assume compared to the success of their films. If a relatively unknown director is offered a flat salary for a movie that turns out to be a huge hit, their compensation will look laughably small. In other cases, directors pour much of their salary into the movie. Guillermo del Toro is notorious for doing this, sinking much of his take-home pay back into the film he’s making in order to execute his artistic vision.
When determining which filmmakers are billionaires, it’s important to define the criteria. Howard Hughes was the first billionaire filmmaker, but he didn’t earn his fortune with movies, so he doesn’t qualify. Additionally, directors who make movies that gross more than a billion dollars in box office returns do not necessarily become billionaires because they don’t get to keep all (or anywhere near most) of that cash.
So, caveats aside, the first filmmaker to become a billionaire through their filmmaking is likely George Lucas. The Star Wars creator made a fateful decision when he opted to shrink his directing salary on the first film from $500,000 to a paltry $150,000 in exchange for sequel and merchandising rights. A zillion movies and merchandising opportunities later, he is Hollywood’s richest man. In 2012, he added to his pile of cash by selling Lucasfilm to Disney for an eye-watering $4.05 billion.
How many of them are there?
Unless you have access to personal financial records, it’s impossible to say exactly how much money a person has, even public figures, but there are ways to estimate based on publicly available information like stock holdings and business profits. There are plenty of filmmakers who come close to the billionaire mark, including Taylor Perry and James Cameron, who each have an estimated net worth of $800 million.
However, there are only two filmmakers aside from Lucas who have passed that threshold, at least as far as the people who spend their time on estimates are concerned. The first, not surprisingly, is Steven Spielberg, who, according to Forbes, has been a billionaire since at least 2016. In fact, it isn’t clear whether he made his first billion before Lucas. Either way, their fortunes are tied in some ways, given their joint involvement in the Indiana Jones franchise.
Spielberg has an estimated net worth of more than $5 billion, thanks to his decades of blockbuster successes like Jaws, ET, and Jurassic Park. He also founded the DreamWorks production company and takes a cut of every ticket purchased at Universal theme parks.
The other Hollywood billionaire is Peter Jackson. The New Zealand director burst onto the international stage when he helmed the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and has continued to make a profit from sequels and spinoffs. He also increased his wealth significantly in 2021 when he sold off part of his special effects company Weta for $1.6 billion.
