Daniel Craig’s ‘Bond 25’ Paycheck Tops the List of Recent Star Salaries
We’re 20 years removed from the days when movie star salaries first exploded into the tens of millions of dollars. When Jim Carrey got a $20 million check to appear in The Cable Guy it became such a huge news story that it almost doomed the film. (“He got paid how much to make that?”)
Given how much bigger the movies have gotten in the intervening decades, it’s sort of surprising that $20 million became a kind of plateau for stars. Actors can earn more, typically by forgoing a salary in exchange for a percentage of potential profits, but a new story in Variety reveals that the top-paid stars in Hollywood today are in many cases failing to crack that ceiling that Carrey broke through in 1996.
Variety also reveals that Daniel Craig, who previously said he’d rather “slash” his wrists than make another James Bond movie, is getting one of the biggest movie star paychecks in recent history for Bond 25: A whopping (and weirdly appropriate) $25 million. In case you are wondering how much it costs to convince a very wealthy movie star not to kill himself and to instead make a movie where he plays the world’s greatest spy.
Here’s the top ten from Variety’s list of notable star paychecks:
Daniel Craig - $25 million (Bond 25)
Dwayne Johnson - $22 million (Red Notice)
Vin Diesel - $20 million (The Fate of the Furious)
Anne Hathaway - $15 million (Barbie)
Jennifer Lawrence - $15 million (Red Sparrow)
Seth Rogen - $15 million (Flarsky)
Tom Cruise - $11-13 million (The Mummy)
Harrison Ford - $10-12 million (Indiana Jones 5)
Sandra Bullock - $10 million (Minions)
Robert Downey Jr. - $10 million (Spider-Man: Homecoming)
Yes, that’s correct: Robert Downey got $10 million for showing up in about 15 minutes of Spider-Man: Homecoming. He got paid roughly $666,666 for every minute he was in that movie. Essentially, Downey gets paid $40 million an hour. Quick question: How do I get a job like that?
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