I remember, and not with much fondness, the days when Hollywood lavished enormous upfront salaries on movie stars on a regular basis. From Tom Cruise to Arnold Scwarzenegger to Julia Roberts, throughout the eighties, nineties and early "noughties" it seemed that most Hollywood execs believed that a key ingredient of any real Hollywood blockbuster was a star whose face people would want to see. This was the rule of thumb; the only exception to the rule seemed to be that certain directors, with or without stars, could put fannies in the seats, like Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, the latter of whom gave the world its first billion dollar hit with Titanic. By and large, though, it was all about who was in front of the camera rather than behind it. Studios were basically starstruck, ponying up astronomical amounts of money to one or two people in the hope of earning even more. It was amusing how even stars without proven box-office clout commanded obscene salaries for years despite starring in several consecutive box-office disappointments, probably because some market analyst had declared them to be "it" boys or girls.
At the beginning of the new millennium, however, three films came out that changed the rules of the game completely: Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Spider-Man. All three movies were based on hugely popular pop-culture properties and therefore had massive built-in audiences, all three movies achieved gargantuan success at the global box-office all three of them flirting with the magic billion dollar mark, and all three movies were "movie-star-free." Not a single member of Hollywood's so-called "elite," with the possible exceptions of Tom Hanks or Leonardo di Caprio, could claim to have starred in any one movie that made as much money as any of those three franchise-starting juggernauts made. None of them had been made by Spielberg or Cameron, either.
Suddenly, $25 million for the services of one actor, whether it was Brad Pitt or Jim Carrey, started to feel a tad expensive. Sure, there were actors who were still worth that much to the powers-that-be, like Will Smith, and the stars of some of the franchise movies were able to jack up their asking price considerably to reappear in sequels (Tobey Maguire's salary went from a song in Spider-Man to a reported $25 million in Spider-Man 2), but the paradigm shift had begun. Soon it became clear that not even Tom Cruise, once thought of as Hollywood's sure thing (TM), could guarantee a movie's box-office success and producers were no longer as willing as they once were to spend huge amounts of money on the stars.
Arguably, Marvel Studios, which kicked off its film roster with 2008's Iron Man, took this new "actors are not the be-all-and-end-all" philosophy of production and cranked it up several notches and in the process became rather notorious for low-balling several of its prospective acting talents. They offered Mickey Rourke a couple of hundred thousand dollars to star in Iron Man 2, and offered an undisclosed but reportedly small amount to Samuel L. Jackson, whose take on Marvel character Nick Fury is practically iconic by now, to star in multiple Marvel movies for years to come, offers which were both initially rejected and had to be renegotiated. With the exception of Robert Downey, Jr., who scored a minimum of $50 million in upfront compensation and back-end deals, the rest of the cast of last year's box-office phenomenon The Avengers were paid a comparative song, with the most optimistic figure amounting to $2 million, after the smoke cleared at the box-office and the smallest figures being something like one-tenth of that.
Now, I would hardly describe a bunch of Hollywood types who probably use their enormous salaries to pay off the second mortgage on their second Malibu mansions or buy their Ferraris as poor, marginalized laborers. After all, a few hundred thousand dollars for a few months' work, which is what Marvel supposedly waved under Rourke's nose while he was basking in the glow of his Oscar nomination for The Wrestler, is the kind of money most people in the world would love to earn over several years, let alone a couple of months.
The thing is, though, that these movies, when they hit, hit big, and I'm not even talking about box-office, which nowadays almost seems like the icing on the cake when compared to income from merchandising and product placement. For years, the Star Wars films had a virtual monopoly on the concept of earning more money from related products than the films themselves, until the Cars franchise came along in 2006 and in a few years earned a reported $8 billion from the sales of its related merchandise, principally consisting of little toy cars sold to kids all around the world.
Franchise movies, particularly runaway successes like The Avengers, make serious money, the kind of money that can even put the annual Gross Domestic Product of several countries in the developing world to shame, and the truth of the matter is that the actors who appear in these movies are on the front line. They spend months living off diets and workout regimens that, if I understand correctly, the human body was not built to sustain, then another several months shooting and in post-production and finally flying around the world promoting the movie. While as actors they're trying to best embody the characters on the written page, in a franchise movie they are serving another function; they double as glorified salesmen and women, tasked with ensuring that people will buy the lunchboxes and blankets and actions figures with their faces on them. I would not go so far as to say that these tasks are worth the tens of millions of dollars that the previously overpaid "A" list used to receive, but in the name of equity I would say that they are worth more than what basically amounts to a few crumbs of a very large pie.
I do not miss the days of $20+ million movie stars, to them I say good riddance, but neither am I a fan of the mindset that actors, previously believed to be the heart and soul of the Hollywood blockbuster, are now basically disposable. There's a chilling effect to all of this and it's the thought that if this can happen to movie actors, it can happen to anyone, like camera crew members, film editors, sound engineers, composers, visual effects animators or the various crew members whose work can spell the difference between cookie-cutter garbage and a work of art. It alarms me to note that the Iron Man franchise, has had three composers in as many films despite being the single most lucrative solo superhero franchise in Marvel's roster. In a pop culture landscape where people have been humming or performing covers of the themes of Superman and Star Wars for over three decades, the fact that Marvel Studios' single most recognizable superhero does not have his own distinct music theme feels like a crime against art.
The most insidious thing about this paradigm shift away from the overpaid movie star is that apparently, the only people who remain indispensable to the production are the "suits," people who, all things considered, contribute the very least to the creative process, but who hold the purse strings, which appear to be the most important consideration. Truth be told I'm not altogether sure that the cure for the $20 million diva is any better than the disease.
I enjoy movies, whether they're larger-than-life blockbusters or subtle, quiet little affairs. Normally, I care very little for what goes on behind the scenes of a movie, meaning that I don't really care if this actor or that director is a prick in real life, for so long as what appears on the screen captivates me. To find out that these performers are decent people in real life is basically a bonus.
When the behind-the-scenes brouhaha threatens the very existence of the movies that I love to watch, however, like squabbles over the actors' asking prices, I cannot help but sit up and take notice. If I may offer unsolicited advice to all concerned, it is simply that there really is no such thing as a win-win solution; there is only what one is willing to pay, and what the other is willing to accept, and the chasm in between, which is where you'll find your solution, whether it's back-end deals, creative control, or some other perk only Hollywood insiders know about.
Surely there is a reasonable middle ground somewhere.
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