It might surprise you to know that there’s a new top money-earner in Hollywood actresses, and it’s Reese Witherspoon.  Of course, it might not, being that I pretty much gave as much away in the title but still, you were probably at least surprised recently.

Apparently, Reese Witherspoon is netting roughly fifteen to twenty million dollars PER PICTURE.  Yeah, per picture.  This is especially handy considering that she shows up in roughly one picture per year, which means on an hourly basis, she’s making roughly ungodly dollars per hour.

Let’s do the math on this one–say that Reese managed to net that full twenty million for her appearance in Walk the Line.  According to the IMDB, Walk The Line took in roughly a hundred and twenty million at the box office.  That means ONE FULL SIXTH of the box office take went into Reese Witherspoon’s pocket.  Assuming title star Joaquin Phoenix got a comparable deal, a third of the take is just GONE, man.  It’s just gone.  Right into the pockets of two people.  It took twenty-nine million dollars to shoot the entire movie, which is only slightly more than Reese Witherspoon was paid for ACTING in it.

How’s that got to feel if you’re, say, the writer who got like thirty grand for the script and happy to get it? Or the key grip working for twelve bucks an hour? No wonder the Screen Actors Guild is going on the warpath–they’ve got ALL THIS to protect!

And this, once again, is part of why the theatrical film industry is in a death spiral.  They’re forking over impossible sums of money–entire double-digit percentages of the take–to ONE PERSON.  Consider that actors in indie films are often paid a minimum wage called scale, or offered a cut of post-shooting revenues, that are far less than this.

Which is why so many studios are considering smaller films.  Look at it this way–if you’re the boss of Lions Gate, and you have a choice to shoot Saw IV for ten million dollars, or pick up The Chair for its shooting budget of a million dollars Canadian, what are you going to do?  Shoot one movie, or shoot TEN for that same amount?  The utility of indie / DTV releasing is enormous, and it’s why Lions Gate is expanding its direct to video offerings on a geometric scale.

And until the last theatre closes, try the Walk the Line trivia on Kwanzoo, just to remember the preposterous sums of cash Reese Witherspoon’s taking home.

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