Many of us box office watchers saw The Avengers climb the charts to billion-dollar rock star throughout the past few weeks, and we could not help but realize that Disney was making a great big pile of money that they did not really need to split with anyone thanks to Marvel Studio’s option-heavy contracts. Today’s news certainly changes the story as it brings to light an interesting bit of information related to those actor salaries.
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Apparently, Robert Downey, Jr. renegotiated his contract (possibly because the original did not include Avengers and a slew of sequels,) and he had it put in that he would receive anywhere from 5-7% back-end for any Marvel movie in which his character appears. Translation: Iron Man is going to score over $50 million from The Avengers alone by time it is said and done. To give you an idea of how absurd this amount is, the actor will be grossing more money from this film than all his co-stars combined.
The second highest paid actors in the film? Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L. Jackson who each will receive about $4-6 million. The rest of the field will get $2-3 million. Yes, it sounds completely unfair, but the reality is that if everyone got paid ‘Robert Downey, Jr. money’ then The Avengers would never have happened.