Tom Cruise, starving artist
p2p news / p2pnet: It looks like Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and others of their ilk, may soon be forced to get new jobs.
No, really. Hollywood stars are being forced to take pay cuts because the Big Six Hollydud studios are, “pulling the plug on big-budget projects”.
“With last year’s box office takings down 5.2 per cent and the cost of making movies ballooning because of added expenses for digital enhancement and global marketing, studios are refusing to meet stars’ financial demands,” says The Independent. “ In addition, several high-profile films due to go into production have suddenly disappeared from view.”
Only three of the 10 highest-grossing films last year (War of the Worlds, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Mr and Mrs Smith) were “star-driven,” says the story. “The rest of the major hits – such as Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Chronicles of Narnia – had no stellar names, or fat salaries, to speak of.”
Not only but also, “all of this year’s Oscar nominees for best actor – Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote), Terence Howard (Hustle and Flow), David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck), Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line) and Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain),” worked for, “rock-bottom wages,” says The Independent.”
But there was no mention the people running Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney having to lower their standards of living and in fact, the studios, “are making sure that before any stars or directors take money from the film, they get their cut,” says the story.
“Sony refused to give the green light for the upcoming romantic comedy The Holiday until Cameron Diaz agreed to a ‘cash break-even’ deal. Even Tom Cruise, who normally collects around 25 per cent of his films’ gross profits, agreed to take a much lower cut for Mission: Impossible 3 when Paramount was faced with a massively bloated budget and at one stage threatened to cancel the project.
“Brad Pitt is another one who has taken a big cut in pay, from his customary fee of up to $30m down to just £750,000 for his latest, The Assassination of Jesse James.”
And, horror of horrors, “In recent weeks Believe It or Not, a film to star Jim Carrey and estimated to cost around £120m, was shut down by Paramount and another Carrey film, Used Guys, was rejected by Fox when the budget passed £90m.”
As we pointed out in our post on the fact Disney is dropping its movie output from 18 films to eight a year and slashing jobs, “The news has a certain amount of irony because one of the favourite paeans of the Big Six studios, Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal —- and Disney —- is p2p is causing huge financial losses as well as untold misery for workers who, as a direct result of file sharing, are losing their livelihoods.
“Both claims are, of course, pure Hollywood fluff. People are staying away from the cinemas because of high admission and popcorn prices, and a non-stop deluge of dross.”
Also See:
The Independent – Revving up with Revver, Ocrober 27, 2005
favourite paeans – Disney slashes jobs – and flics, July 13, 2006
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July 17th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
Ain’t it a shame that actors are going to have their incomes limited? Perhaps this is indicative of inflation raring it’s ugly head again as the bills for the war on terror comes due. That money has to come from somewhere and the government is in completion with Joe Public for available funds.
Not only is inflation partly responsible but Hollydud as been foisting off poorly made sequels, increasing the use of expensive FX in film making, and has in the past been pretty much of the opinion that a blank check was part of the film making process.
People are tired of being ripped off at the theater. What was the theater experience has been down-graded with the near mandatory showing of commercials, the rip off of the concession stand, the endless lines and high cost in general. They are saying so with their wallets.
July 17th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
Look, I’ve been fairly open on my opinion of the money ‘actors’ and ‘artists’ make for their ‘product’. None of them deserve the money they’ve made, not one of them.
We have people in here in America working their rear ends off – most of them will never know what it’s like to make $20/hr, much less $120m for a couple months of playing in front of a camera.
Sure, they bring some fun or adventure or drama or romance (and a few unmentionables) to our home theater systems but does that really mean they’re worth the price of admission? Lately, the garbage films have been tanking SO bad it’s cost their industry – GOOD! Now perhaps they’ll do better group-studies and test marketing to find out if people like the idea before spending a hundred million dollars (which, by the way, is enough for 4,166 people to be paid the average wage in America of about $24,000 USD each).
GOOD (meaning they’ve won awards and are in the top 50 actors) actors are worth a solid $60,000 per YEAR for their work. All the rest, below that top 50 are worth the average wage, $24,000. The Director’s of ‘average’ movies are worth $24,000 and the directors of GOOD (meaning top 10) movies are worth $60,000. That’s about it.
The reality folks is sure, it costs money to make money. There’s no reason why a good movie can’t be made for $1,000,000 in this day and age – we do have computers. Hire some geeks(the best known), pay them on similar scales. If they produce the average quality movies, pay them $24,000 and for the ones making GOOD movies, pay them $60,000.
Seems fair enough. Let’s presume it takes them 3 months to get it done.
Digital equipment: $200,000
Blue-Screen room to work in, as nearly all images could be cgi other than the actors. $100,000
Power for the blue-screen room and computers $4,000
10 average actors $240,000
3 GOOD actors $180,000
3 average geeks $72,000
3 GOOD geeks $180,000
Two high end Mac’s to produce the film: $12,000
Heck throw in 3 McDonald’s McChicken sandwiches each per day with a value size drink as a bonus. $5000
Okay, so thatâs a million bucks and sure I recognize that most actors would be upset as would most directors and geeks involved; however, I’m not to the ‘good’ part yet.
Should the movie make more than that million dollars, the entire crew would split the profit – though there would be a few price changes to suit the demand of us, their customers.
Let’s presume $4 to view the movie at the theater is the right price to make people stop exercising fair use. As it stands now with roughly $10/person to enter a theater. For those movies that made 100mil, that’d be 10mil people at $10 each. Drop that price to $4, making the total made at 40mil because of the customer-friendly pricing.
Now, the people who helped make the movie make their $1mil I mentioned above, the profit on the film would be $39mil. For any movie making more than $5mil in profit, the production company would be required to donate 25% of the profit to some place like the Bill gates foundation (cant stand the guy but think they do a good job with the foundation). So in this case, that would leave 29mil. The production company would take 50% of that profit for itself and the remaining 50% would be equally divided by everyone involved.
If you think that’s harsh, you should hear my opinion on the Oil business…. If I were President, I’d ban OIL usage greater than 2% within the US and require all gas stations be selling ethanol within 90 days, place a lock on prices of ethanol at current rates and a lock on the prices of the hardware to upgrade your car at $100 per vehicle. All ethanol would be required to be grown/produced in country, no importing fuel as it’d be a Federal crime. No exporting unless our surplus was sufficient enough to last a REAL 40 years, no less…. and I’m just getting started.
Anyway, thatâs just my 10 cents.
_-Jile-_
July 17th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
There are other issues in this besides stupidly large salaries.
Not to support “stars” and their outrageous demands, but…
There was a time when big names would step into a project for a percentage. (And not 25!) One of the tricks used by studios was to have the legal entity producing the film charged large amounts of promotion money while at the same time the ‘distributor’ took in the theater money and paid little to the production company. That way I could hire the likes of Tom Cruise for 2% of the profits from a $200,000,000 grossing movie only for him to find out that the production entity only made $50,000 in profit. Once the ’star’ saw his $1,000 cheque, he started asking for money up front.
July 17th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
I haven’t visited the cinema in ages nor have I bought any DVD movie releases as their prices have gone rocketing high in the recent years.
July 18th, 2006 at 12:38 am
couldnt it be that all the movies are gay shit? they are complete re-makes or taken ideas put in with a stupid story.
July 18th, 2006 at 1:35 am
You are absolutely right!!!
Enough with the Remakes give us something new Hollywood.
July 18th, 2006 at 6:18 am
Yes, I’m sure those actors work _really_ hard to get where they are, but Brad Pitt’s “customary fee of up to $30m” wasn’t EVER going to last. I probably won’t earn $30m over the course of my LIFE – he works for ~4 months on a movie, gets 100 minutes of screentime and earns enough to feed a small African nation for a year.
I wonder what went wrong?
July 18th, 2006 at 11:35 am
“Anyway, thatâs just my 10 cents.”
That is what would cost to get and see a movie if:
1. A one dollar “movie tax” were paid by 25 percent of the world’s population. That would raise US$2 billion.
2. With the US$2 billion tax money, 2,000 one million dollar (average) can be produced yearly. That is a big enogh pool of movies to satisfy everyones movie need. Free use and reuse of footage on file could be used to decrease costs. In essense, no copyrights.
3. The world’s population was able to get a “free copy” through sharing. If you paid the A one dollar “movie tax” and watched 10 movies a year, then the cosy is 10 cents. Of course if you watch 100 movies, then the cost is one cent per view.
4. Movie would be available for downloading to a hard disk, so there would be no cost of blank dvd’s involve.
I believe the above, or something similar, is the future of movies (and music too), where the big time profiteers have no role.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
July 19th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
I think it’s called the U.S. of A.
July 23rd, 2006 at 3:53 am
Cough sputter WHAT? Title should be “Hollywood goes to economics and reality class.” Breaks my heart to see pre-madonnas seeking and realizing reality. Maybe we could have a block buster “CHEAP” Striesand <Sp> sing along entitled Holly-Aid and help them out with our 2 cents.