An analysis of Vanity Fair's Hollywood Rich List

The Vanity Fair Top 40 Hollywood rich list came out the other day and despite my lack of qualifications in finance, I'm going to analyse the figures for you so you can observe how poverty-stricken you are in comparison.

Vanity Fair says in the intro that ‘Calculating … earning power is an inexact science’, and that the figures are ‘presented for entertainment purposes only’. Which is precisely what we want them for! So let’s go.

*The top earner of 2009 was a guy called Michael Bay, who directed Transformers. His name makes me think of Michael Bolton/‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay’, and now I’ve got that song stuck in my head, haven't I?

*I would have thought this would annoy everyone else too, but apparently Hollywood doesn’t seem to mind, because they keep giving him massive movies to direct! This is how last year he earned a total of $125 million.

*Wikipedia tells me Michael Bay’s dad is a CPA, and I really wish Bay Snr was here right now to help me interpret what $125 million in real money is. I can’t even comprehend it. All I know is that if you strike off five of the zeros from $125,000,000, you get how much I earned last year. No, really.

*Steven Spielberg, the number two richest, earned $50 million last year from Universal theme-park royalties and consulting fees alone (in an ongoing deal signed in 1987). I am just flabbergasted that you could have an ongoing amount of around $50 million a year coming in to you from theme ride profits. Since 1987.

*The Harry Potter kids raked it in in 2009. Daniel Radcliffe is number sixth richest on the list, Emma Watson is at 14 and Rupert Grint is number 15.

*Watson is the first woman to appear on the list, and therefore she is the female with the most earnings in 2009. At number 14.

*Now, I’m not that good at maths, but to me this seems to indicate that the top 13 earners in Hollywood are all pasty white men. Oh yeah. I should have just looked at the picture that accompanies the article in Vanity Fair and I would have already known this.

*Let's take a vocab break! Too much talking about money will rot our souls. So anyway, I always like to draw the public’s attention to the word 'penultimate' whenever it's employed correctly in print and speech, and we see an excellent example pop up here in the VF article. The sentence relates to the fee Radcliffe got for his second-to-last Potter film:

$20 million: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I (fee for starring in upcoming penultimate Potter film)

So now we all get what it means now? Thank you Vanity Fair for the important vocab lesson.

*Meanwhile, the English language is otherwise being massacred every time the article refers to a film as a ‘threequel’,a  ‘fourquel’ or a 3-D-quel’. Although I secretly really love those words. Invent away, Hollywood.

*Tyler Perry does quite well for himself, doesn’t he? I didn't really know who he was, but he’s only a bit behind Jerry Bruckheimer in total earnings. And he got $2 million for executive-producing a film called Georgia Sky ‘without his name’, whatever that means.

*What would he have gotten if it was ‘with his name’, I wonder? A quick dash over to the IMDB page for the film states very clearly that movie is produced by 'The Tyler Perry Company' though, so it looks like he got TRICKED, whatever the case.

*Robert Pattinson got $4 million for starring in Remember Me, a non-Twilight film. I want to know two things here:

1. When did he find the time to do anything other than hold hands with Kristen Stewart off-screen all year, and

2. Kristen Stewart only got paid $2 million for her highly-anticipated film, The Runaways, which she also managed to fit in at some stage when she wasn't holding hands with Robert Pattinson. And yet: we all know that The Runaways is going to be SUCH a better film than Remember Me, so WHERE IS THE FAIRNESS IN PAYING HER HALF OF PATTINSON'S FEE, HOLLYWOOD?

*The figures show how insanely lucrative voice work is these days. Check out Tom Hank’s fee for Toy Story 3 ($15 million), Cameron Diaz’s for Shrek Forever After ($10 million), Reese Witherspoon’s for Monsters vs Aliens ($10 million), Johnny Depp’s for Rango ($7.5 million), Brad Pitt’s for Megamind ($5 million), and Ben Stiller’s for Madagascar 2 ($5 million). By the time you see that Steve Carell only earnt $500,000 for voice work in the ‘upcoming animated feature Despicable Me’, you’re pretty sure he got totally ripped off.

*The entry for the number 25 richest, Katherine Heigl, contains a spelling mistake. I’m just letting you know so you can go and find it for yourself and write enraged letters to Vanity Fair about editorial integrity, because I know you care about spelling as much as I do.

In conclusion:

Brad Pitt only got $1 million for executive-producing the upcoming Eat, Pray, Love with Julia Roberts, and I really think he should have been paid so much more for putting himself through that. On the other hand, Angelina Jolie got $20 million for starring in the spy thriller, Salt, so thank god, their family will still eat tonight.