![]() Director: Steven Soderbergh Year Of Release: 2000 Plot: Erin Brockovich is a brassy, unemployed single mother who browbeats her lawyer into hiring her after a lawsuit he was representing her in fails. Despite the fact no one takes her seriously, due to her slightly trashy ways, Erin begins to investigate a case involving the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, which involves land contaminated with hexavalent chromium. This leads her to a community who may have poisoned by the companys actions and a massive class action lawsuit. |
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Movie stars get paid an awful lot on money. Julia Roberts was the first woman to join the elite $20 million club with Erin Brockovich, which is what she got paid upfront to take on the role that would later win her an Oscar. Many people find it obscene how much money stars get paid, and dont understand how anyone could have the gall to ask that much just to pretend to be someone else, so why do these huge paycheques exist?
The reason is that there are two competing forces in Hollywood the studios and the agents each of which is keen to channel as much of the money from a film into their pockets as possible. $20 million may be a ridiculous amount of money for anyone to be paid for anything (it was more than a third of Erin Brockovichs entire budget), but from an agents perspective, theyre thinking that a studio is potentially going to be making a hell of a lot more profit than that from a film. So if they can wrangle it, why shouldnt they and their clients have the cash, rather than the studio?
In the last couple of years its become much more difficult for even the biggest of stars to get these gargantuan paycheques. Despite the movie business weathering the financial storm better than most industries, the ability for the studios to raise financing has been curtailed, which has given them a stronger position in negotiations. Before that, if a studio wanted a particular star, it was much more difficult to argue they simply couldnt afford it.
Its also true that many feel star power has weakened recently. The reason actor paycheques reached such ridiculous amounts to start with was because of the growing importance of the opening weekend box office. Whereas films used to open and then be able to find their audience over several weekends, through the 90s the opening weekend became paramount if you didnt draw in a massive audience then, you never would, partly because there was so much product in the marketplace, and partly because cinemas arent afraid to quickly drop a movie thats underperforming.
So how do you draw an audience in those first few days? Well, the thinking was that you do it with movie stars. The idea is that if you put Tom Cruise in a film (at least a few years ago, as his star has gone off the boil now), not only will his fans turn up, but you also get the benefit of the persona hes built up in his previous movies. By paying a huge amount for a star, youre not just buying them for that specific movie, but also what that star means to the audience. So in Toms case, it generally meant dumb fun action movies, so you would hopefully draw in an audience based on an audiences understanding of what Tom Cruise means.
It was against this backdrop that actor paydays started escalating. It was seen as vital not only to have a known, talented lead in the movie, but also as the central plank of the marketing, with some stars, such as Cruise and Will Smith, seen as so famous that they alone would be enough to open the film, irrespective of what it was about.
However the problem has been that as the pay went up, the studios confidence that they actually needed a big star diminished. It turned out that no movie star could be guaranteed to open a movie, with even some of the biggest stars, such as Will Smith, barely drawing anyone if they were in a film that was outside what people expected from them.
And then there were the profit participation deals. Nowadays, big stars dont just expect to be paid upfront, they also expect a percentage of whatever a movie makes at the box office. Whereas smaller players may get paid a percentage of the profits after all the overheads are taken into account, a massive star can, if they get the right deal, demand a percentage of every movie ticket. This can quickly get expensive, with the result that by the late 90s and early 20s, not only were studios having to pay $20-$30 million upfront for a star, but they might also be giving them 10% of the box office. As, on average, the studio only gets about half the price of a cinema ticket (the theatre gets the other half), it meant they were getting an ever smaller piece of the pie to pay all their bills, especially considering the fact budgets were growing exponentially.
It really was a time of nonsensically massive paydays for actors. Tom Cruise is believed to have taken home over $70 million all in for Mission: Impossible III, while Keanu Reeves got $30 million upfront for the two Matrix sequels, plus 15% of the box office gross, which is believed to have netted him well over $100 million dollars.
Although there have been a few such gargantuan deals in recent years (its believed Harrison Ford got over $50 million from Indiana Jones 4), in general things have calmed down a lot. With the credit crunch, studios have found it easier to play hardball, and while actors can still command huge paydays, theyre rarely on the scale seen 10 years ago. Equally, the number of big movies that have succeeded without huge name stars, from Star Trek to Transformers, has proven to the studios that that you dont necessarily need star power to succeed. Indeed many have suggested its a tough time for the a-list (Im not suggesting we should cry for them, as they still get millions), as whereas 10 years ago studios were so desperate for them they could name their terms, nowadays Hollywood is far more likely to walk away if they dont like the terms of a deal.
In fact with budgets continuing to escalate, the thinking it generally that its better to spend more on the special effects and action, rather than the star, as these are now thought to be what draws people in (although studios are even rethinking that, with Sony, for example, wanting to make the next Spider-man for under $100 million, compared to around $300 million to get Spider-man III into cinemas).
For example, late last year, Paramount decided it was paying Denzel Washington way too much for the upcoming Tony Scott film Unstoppable. Hed originally negotiated a deal that would have netted him $20 million upfront. But when the studio looked at how the budget the budget had grown, as well as the general box office performance of Scott and Washingtons recent films (not to mention that they signed Chris Pine much cheaper, which made Washington less vital), they decided to make cutbacks across the board, and Denzels pay was the first place they chopped. The actor immediately left the film, in what appeared to be power play to try and make Paramount go back to what theyd originally agreed. A decade ago the studio would have collapsed and agreed to Washingtons terms, but now they wouldnt budge, so Denzel had to return, with a payday $7 million than what hed initially expected. The feeling was that even a star like Denzel is worth losing, whereas it used to be that everything else in the budget was negot
iable, but the star came first.
Its very difficult to imagine Julia Roberts getting $20 million for Erin Brockovich today, not least because her star has slightly waned in the past 10 years. While the movie turned out to be a big hit, it got made largely because Julia wanted to do it. With stars not seen as being as powerful as they used to be, Roberts could probably still get the movie financed today, but shed be expected to take a massive pay cut on her usual salary, as the film would likely be seen, to a certain extent, as a vanity project that the studio didnt expect to make much cash from.
Its not just in pay-per-film that stars have lost out, as a decade ago every actor worth his salt had a big production company, which was fully funded by a studio that would more or less agree to make whatever the star wanted to. In many cases this proved foolhardy, as the actors developed projects with little commercial potential, which not only bombed, but actually hurt these a-listers status as a box office titan. As a result many of these production companies were cut free, and those that remained werent given quite as much freedom and development cash as they once were.
For example, after a nearly 20 year relationship, Tom Cruise was pretty much fired from Paramount a few years ago, after the companys chief, Sumner Redstone, realised the amount of cash the actor was sucking up (it was just before Cruise had his crazy spell, which probably isnt a coincidence). It was a move that shocked Hollywood, as at the time it was thought Cruise was pretty much untouchable, but just goes to show that in the last few years nobody is sacred, and while theyll still get a lot of cash, the a-list dont have it quite as easy as 10 years ago.
TIM ISAAC
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