The End of the Movie Star? 3 Takeaways from the List of Hollywood’s Highest Paid Actors

How Streaming Is Changing the Game. Plus, Where Are the Women?

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Last week, Variety released its annual report on movie stars’ salaries. It contained some eye-popping numbers. Tom Cruise earned $100 million for Top Gun: Maverick. Will Smith nabbed $35 million for Emancipation (before his infamous Oscars slap). Leonardo DiCaprio hauled in $30 million for Killers of the Flower Moon. Dwayne Johnson secured $35 million for Black Adam.

As one studio executive told the industry trade publication of Cruise, noting his relentless zeal for promotion, “I would never bet against Tom Cruise. Most actors aren’t worth what you pay them, but Cruise and maybe Dwayne Johnson justify their salaries.”

So, what do actors get paid?

Here are the Top 20:

Tom Cruise Top Gun: Maverick $100M

Will Smith Emancipation $35M

Leonardo DiCaprio Killer of the Flower Moon $30M

Brad Pitt Formula 1 Drama $30M

Dwayne Johnson Black Adam $22.5M

Will Ferrell Spirited $20M

Chris Hemsworth Extraction 2 $20M

Vin Diesel Fast X $20M

Tom Hardy Venom 3 $20M

Joaquin Phoenix Joker 2 $20M

Ryan Reynolds Spirited $20M

Denzel Washington The Equalizer 3 $20M

Jason Momoa Aquaman: Lost Kingdom $15M

Eddie Murphy Beverly Hills Cop 4 $15M

Chris Pine Star Trek $13M

Steve Carell Minions: The Rise of Gru $12.5M

Ryan Gosling Barbie $12.5

Margo Robbie Barbie $12.5

Millie Bobby Brown Enola Holmes 2 $10M

Timothée Chalamet Wonka $9M

Timothee Chalamet (Photo by Mike Marsland/WireImage)

But as Variety also observed that this year’s list marks a significant change from a few years ago:

Cruise’s pact is a vestige of a time when stars, not superheroes, were the reason that audiences flocked to movie theaters to see a new release. But things have changed since Marvel took the box office hostage in the early aughts, putting an interchangeable array of Chrises in spandex and masks. The problem is that even though those actors are surefire draws any time the Avengers assemble, they can’t always attract a crowd when they try to leverage their success in other genres.

Here are three takeaways from the state of Hollywood in 2022:

1. Streaming Is Killing Stars

In a provocative analysis of star salaries called “Will the Stars Ever Make Money in This Town Again?” Bloomberg points out that streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+ are displacing the box office as the chief metric of star power and replacing it with subscriber sign ups.

Streaming will forever change the way everyone in Hollywood gets paid. Fading movie theaters mean that stars’ bonuses may soon hinge not on ticket sales but on how many subscribers sign up and other unconventional performance measures informed by social-media platforms such as TikTok. And increasingly, power over these financial arrangements is shifting from the iconic studios that once defined Hollywood to a handful of companies mostly in the technology world, including Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., and Netflix Inc.

(Photo by Chris Delmas / AFP) (Photo by CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images)

While salaries might still appear high for those services, actors don’t have the opportunity to secure percentages of DVD sales, TV channel broadcasts, and licensing agreements. As Bloomberg put it, “When a film is made exclusively for a streaming app, there are no such back-end revenue streams for actors.”

2. Where Are the Women?

Australian Margot Robbie is the highest-paid woman on this year’s list, and she appears at only number 18, tied (impressively) with her costar in Barbie. Of the top 26 names on the list, only 5 are women. In a notable curiosity, only one of those 5 women – Jamie Lee Curtis in the alleged final edition of Halloween—is American. The others are Millie Bobby Brown (British), Emily Blunt (British), and Anya Taylor-Joy (British, though she was born in Miami as a “fluke” when her parents were on holiday).

Tom Nunan, a lecturer at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television, called this state of affairs “stupid” and “wrong.”

"No audience wants to be served up the same old/same old, over and over again," Nunan explains. "Wonder Woman, Black Widow, Captain Marvel, and The Old Guard all prove that women can and do open major, blockbuster franchises."

3. We’ve Reached Peak ‘Peak Content’

I’ve spent quite a lot of time in and around Hollywood in the last decade, including having one of my books, Council of Dads, become a primetime network series on NBC. The mood, to a person, was these are the best of times. The lag in the movie business was more than replaced by the rise of prestige television. We are a peak content, the saying went.

No one is saying that anymore. Perhaps the most striking thing about the highest paid actor list is how old and familiar most names are. Jason Momoa and Timothée Chalamet are the only men that might be remotely described as newcomers. The rest are getting long in the tooth. As the world faces heightened inflation and economic slowdown, Hollywood will not be immune.

As Variety said in its analysis:

There’s a nagging sense that as the country braces for recession and media companies see their stock prices plunge, stars could start to feel the pinch. After years of free-spending, Netflix has signaled to investors that it is serious about maintaining its operating margins at 19% to 20%. That’s made the streamer much more selective about writing huge checks for buzzy projects. At the same time, companies like Warner Bros. Discovery are grappling with heavy debt loads and have made a commitment to slash costs.

So save your money, Hollywood. You’re not immune to downtrends. We’ll always want stars, but these days we appear to want to see them as much out of makeup and out of character on their social media feeds, were we can see them when we want, instead of all made up and in character on the silver screen, where what we have to give up to see them is a lot more than it used to be -- and a lot more than it's worth.

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Cover images: Will Smith (Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images); Brad Pitt (Photo by Gregg DeGuire/Getty Images); The Rock (Photo by Alberto Rodriguez/Getty Images)