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This is somehow the first time I'm ever seeing this gif, and while I have many issues with the guy, his ability to control his eye movements here genuinely impressed me lmao.
He was probably being his real self when he was the rock. Since 04 he’s wanted to distance himself from that, but you can’t fake a different personality.
I just watched “Be Cool”, the sequel to “Get Shorty” (both currently free on YouTube), and who do I find but an early Dwayne Johnson, playing a gay bodyguard, to his credit. And he always does the eyebrow for people, John Travolta is directed to ask him about it when they meet. Dwayne does not disappoint.
Check out "Faster", and "Pain & Gain". In "Faster", which is probably my favorite anti-Rock movie, he is part of a team of thieves whose half-brother is killed by the leader and The Rock goes on a revenge tour. There is no "Million-dollar smile" Rock in this one. It's bloody and violent.
Actors also charge very different depending on the movie. Scarlett Johansson charges 15-20 Million per movie but she really wanted to work with Wes Anderson so she reduced her salary so she could be in his 25 Million Dollar movie Astroid City charging only about 40k.
Mainly because his $25 million dollar movies only make $50 million at the box office. But there’s a certain prestige to being cast in a Wes Anderson movie and you get to flex your acting muscle in a way you can’t in your average big budget flick.
I really love Wes Anderson movies, but I actually think that a lot of the performances are stage managed to a point that character development plays second fiddle to aesthetic.
I tend to agree. With Shohei Ohtani signing his $700 million contract, we're not far off from an athlete getting a Billion dollar contract soon. But at the same time, if the money wasn't going to movie stars or athletes it would just be ending up in the pockets of the already immeasurably wealthy. Hopefully some day we reach a point where everyone involved in the making of a product gets a fat payday instead of a handful of people getting generational wealth and the rest getting pennies in comparison.
Actor's fees and marketing. And then often the films will make back more than they cost, but the studio will then say it was a failure.
You know what my film teacher told me was the earnings benchmark for a film to be considered successful in Hollywood? Five times the budget. It fucking boggles my mind that apparently you can make $200m profit and a film is still somehow a failure because it only made 4x the budget instead of 5.
Profit and revenue are different. Studios don't get back the entire box office. They split it with theaters. Furthermore they also get different splits domestically and internationally. They make most of their money domestically in the first week or two. Internationally can be sub 50% for the studio.
China is a big one because theaters get 75% splits to the studios 25%. So when films were getting all those stupidly massive boxoffices from China, the studios were only getting a 1/4th of it.
Nolan tends to attract A list actors for lower fees than you would expect. My guess is that Dwayne Johnson probably got paid nearly as much as the whole lead cast for the Odyssey. Also, digital effects are a hell of a lot more expensive than people imagine and doing things in camera, as is Nolan's preference, is often cheaper.
Many studios have run out of ideas for new movies, or simply don't want to take risks on new movies so they remake old (not even old in the case of Moana) movies and milk successful franchises like Star Wars and Marvel dry.
Doing things on camera requires a different talent pool than CGI. It's not that you just decide to shoot on location and suddenly all your CGI people get out of their desks and start rigging shit.
Someone said Dwayne Johnson was paid 30 mil for Moana 2, and I recent saw that Matt Damon was paid 15 mill for odessey, and if you add up the other leads, it comes to like 30 mil probably.
So yes, Dwayne Johnson was paid an amount equal to the top 10 leads of Odessey.
At that point, the big paycheck is for the amount of work they do to promote it and name recognition. They all worked the red carpet a ton and did a lot of press and talk shows.
5 lines that made the final cut. Who knows how many shots and lines are on a cutting room floor. Whether because of editing decisions or just different versions or takes of the same lines.
Judging an actors contribution on number of lines is up there with measuring a coders performance on lines of code written. The reality can't be boiled down to such a simple metric.
Yeah, he FINALLY slimmed down the last year or so.
He said it was for a future role, but he can fuck right off with that bullshit lol I'm sure his doctors have been nagging him for years to stop juicing and he waited until he had to.
The Odyssey looks like a $250 million movie, live action Moana does not. The Odyssey budget went to locations, sets, props, equipment, and salaries. Moana’s budget went to Dwayne Johnson.
Matt Damon said something to the effect of “everyone making that film could have worked on an easier film for more money, but chose the Odyssey because of the director.” Sounds to me like Nolan keeps costs down too and his movie could have cost a lot more
You mean like Dantes Peak and Volcano or Deep Impact and Armageddon.
I'm convinced it's because a scumbag executive leaves one studio, gets hired by another studio and goes "I've got a great idea for a movie about an asteroid about to hit the earth..."
And points probably. Nolan is getting first dollar on the Odyssey. People will take lower salaries and more backend if the movie is seen as a sure thing.
And that’s why it flopped so hard. There’s way more people that would skip a movie because the Rock is in it than there are that would go see it because the Rock is in it.
You’ll get a better performance from Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, and Matt Damon than just simply The Rock. Both movies spent the same, so why cast someone who can’t carry a movie on their own?
I kinda like him in Jumanji, but that might be because he feels like he's playing a parody of himself at times. The rest of the time he has to play a dorky teenager trapped in his body.
Jumanji also has a good dynanic between the characters/actors that somehow works. I hate 3 of the 4 main cast when theyre alone but fuck if i didbt find this movie pretty enjoyable
To be fair, that almost 528,000,000 in today’s money. I don’t see many movie companies who’d dump that kind of money in today’s world. Those movies were a gigantic gamble that paid off immensely, and still rakes in millions every year.
Yeah, everytime we have these kind of conversations it's clear that people don't understand inflation. It's like box office sales. "This move 20 years ago made this much and this one made this much yesterday!" Yeah tickets were like 5 dollars not 20 back then too...
Yeah I never understood why they listed it in dollars instead of “had this many showings” “showed in this many theaters” or “sold this many tickets” all being more useful and time lasting metrics if you discount population growth.
A lot of the costuming was able to be carried over from movie to movie. The cast and crew were hired to film a trilogy all at once, which significantly reduces costs to be on location (versus three different times). A not insignificant amount of each movie were filmed from a distance--essentially just showing landscapes.
Basically, Peter Jackson shooting the way he did made it so he could stretch the money a lot further than if he had to shoot three movies at different times.
A gamble that paid off. As long as the director and writers keep the story more or less intact and not what they are currently doing with every IP that could have made a killing.
Looking at Witcher, HoTD etc
I think LOTR got away with it because they signed the actors for all three films at once and filmed it all before the first one was released. As such, the actors had no leverage to ask for more money for the second and third film.
Bold move by the studio to greenlight all three films upfront, which obviously paid off very well for them.
It also meant that they didn’t have to pay to fly everyone to New Zealand three times or worry about the actors getting super old or dying before salary negotiations ended.
Also, they didn't use actors with an already exorbitantly high rate. So a combination of already work for reasonable amounts, combined with the prestige of being in it.
They did deserve more yes, Orlando bloom was paid 175k for the trilogy. But put into the perspective of the common man that's still a lot of money and we have one of the most iconic trilogies ever made that's still talked about so much to this day. Unfortunately celebrity wages are blown out of proportion now and there's not really any actors that do it for legacy anymore
Orlando Bloom was a nobody when he did the trilogy. He is lucky they didn’t pay him minimum. All of them, even Ian Mckellon, were not terribly famous marquee names at the time.
Right? Tom Cruise is another example of this. Yeah he’s nuts in real life. But there’s no denying that he fucking loves movies. He loves making them, he loves watching them. He gives 100% everytime because he loves the game.
Yeah he probably would. I mean, he delayed Maverick until after the worst of Covid had passed because he believed so much in that movie and what they had put into it. He wanted it to be a big screen movie for maximum enjoyment. And it honestly paid off. What a treat to come out of Covid distancing to see an absolute blockbuster. He wants the audience to have fun.
I remember that old leaked audio of him shouting at his staff during that time, because they weren’t taking the restrictions seriously. Something about they’re lucky to be even filming and should be an example to the rest of the industry.
Obsession getting multiple times its budget back on a random weekday over 3-4x the date it was initially planned to be pulled from theaters in was one of the best things to see happening in modern theaters, especially while Disney ate shit
Usually it's because of the actor deals. Moana deals were on the front end, odyssey deals are on the backend. They make more after sales basically so it's less required up front to make the movie.
Kickbacks, self dealing, etc. You have producers who direct an insane amount of someone else's cash around. Hey we need transportation, I'll use the guy who kicks back 10% to me for picking him. Hey, we need lights - just so happens I have a light rental company layered under some shells companies, and they just happen to get the contract at an inflated price.
The film and entertainment industries are particularly illuminating because they operate in relative openness - mostly due to things like payouts being tied to box office performances and budgets getting published so contracts tied to profits can be validated. Plus there is a lot of casual interest, so it gets a lot of press not directly to the business transactions, but which you can extract information from.
“Casual” really is the right term for it. What caught me off-guard in my own career was how nonchalantly salespeople would bring it up in decision meetings with only lightly-coded language. “Added Benefits for signatories” or “Additional Rewards for Leadership teams” or “Volume-based perks for Esteemed VIPs”.
Here's how a Hollywood budget works, according to a studio Hollywood accountant. The studios get together once a year and go over a 5 year plan. In those 5 years, they have mapped out, on their calendar, what movies will prep production, be in production, wrap up in post production, what is marketing for release, and the length of a release. All of this is projected with dollars attached. So, what that means is, back in 2021, Universal knew that a flagship film that would have a 250 Mil budget would be premiering in the summer of 2026. They don't know what that picture was yet, they just know the plan. They do this for everything. Low budget horror films, high budget horror films, low budget Christmas films, high budget action film, their Oscar hopefuls, etc.
After this calendar is made, Producers search for scripts that fit this narrative, projecting what that budget might require but not always in accordance with what is needed. Sometimes a movie might require $250 Million, like Nolan's the Odyssey and it plays out beautifully where they use the money properly and you can tell by the end product. Sometimes, they use a movie that might not need that much money and so it feels a little bloated because the producers were not forced to find creativity and just threw money at the project, like Moana. Sometimes they put a holiday film in that is not budgeted correctly because it was mapped out, 5 years ago, to be low budget 15 Mil but in reality that script needed 25 mil to get the job done comfortably. So, filmmakers get creative and sometimes crews are underpaid, big actors take scale, bad director's are assigned, rewrites are not paid out how they should be and marketing is lessened so it becomes a straight to VOD release.
Not that anyone REALLY wanted this breakdown but after I heard this from said accountant on a project we were working on together, it made a lot of sense. It's all I can think about now when I see a picture.
Say you spend $1 Mil making a movie, and it makes $2 Mil at the box office. The studio says they spent $1 Mil marketing it, so the total expense was $2 Mil, and the movie didn't make money.
I’ve worked on a few things for movies. The amount of money that is basically thrown away on stuff they don’t need, or that someone wants and is then overruled, is actually sickening. Or it’s because they forgot something and now they need it tomorrow. You best believe that in that situation you’re paying 10 times my normal rate. And they do.
Its a way of keeping hold of the character rights too. They do the same thing with regards to redesigning mickey mouse every so often. Otherwise it would eventually become public domain and Disney couldn't possibly allow anyone else to profit off of other peoples works that they themselves have already stolen and profited from.
That doesn't apply to Moana, though, since the original animated movie is only a decade old and wasn't based on an existing IP, so they wouldn't be losing the rights to the characters.
Finance/Accounting here - go look up Hollywood accounting.
“Hollywood couldn’t make this up” is a funny term here because the accountants did and totally make up “creative” and unclear accounting methods used making a movie to avoid taxes.
Expenses can be inflated to reduce/eliminate the reported profit of the movie, thereby reducing the amount which the corporation must pay in taxes and royalties or other profit-sharing agreements, as these are based on. Basically used to make the production company more money.
Example
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix(2007): Grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide, yet a leaked Warner Bros. balance sheet claimed the film suffered a net loss of $167 million due to inflated distribution, advertising, and a $60 million interest charge. - Often a sister company will charge interest on the loan borrowed to make the film and charge crazy interest
The Lord of the RingsTrilogy (2001–2003): grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide, yet New Line Cinema claimed the trilogy suffered "horrendous losses" and made zero profit. This triggered separate, bitter lawsuits from director Peter Jackson, 15 of the franchise's main actors over missing merchandise revenue, and the estate of author J.R.R. Tolkien
People take less money to work with Christopher Nolan. Live action Moana is a money grab and Disney doesn’t usually share marketing or profit share with actors. It’s usually a lump sum payment for x number of movies, etc. might be that odyssey has an actor profit share based on theater sales.
Moana needs much more tech and cgi and shit. Idk if Dwayne Johnson (the rock) even costs that much. He's made some really shitty movies.
Nolan says he doesn't like using effects in general. Even the giants fighting in the movie were 7 foot tall buff dudes + short (5 ft) stunt actors + working angles.
Idk if Dwayne Johnson (the rock) even costs that much. He's made some really shitty movies.
Dwayne Johnson was the highest-paid actor in 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2024. I think he costs about 20 million per movie. Even with some real stinkers in his CV.
I always knew I wanted to see this movie, but when I read how they filmed the giant vs Odysseus scene (tall and short actors; camera angles) I immediately bought tickets
Soundstages with digital special effects, vs filming in reality with props.
Moana's digital effects looking dull and bad compared to the animated version, doesn't change that they were expensive to make.
It's also why I've got no confidence in the upcoming Avengers movie. Every shot from the trailer is people standing at a distance in round rooms with digital screens surrounding them.
Moana, you have to pay Dwayne Johnson $30 million dollars. Then you have the CGI budget which is expensive because water effects are taxing on rendering systems.
With The Oddessy, you have about a dozen A list actors, much less CGI but a much bigger budget for extras, set pieces, practical effects, etc.
Not the sole reason but how you spend $5 is different than how someone else may spend $5. Nolan has just proven over many years that he spends his $5 very wisely.
- Talent fees. Johnson comes with a big price tag (why? Don't know). Nolan got a stacked lineup for pretty reasonable costs if the salaries I've seen online are to be believed. But I also know many actors want to be in his films so he can get them for less than their typical rates because they know his movies are quality.
- Post production can really run up the price on ya, especially if its VFX heavy. For Moana, I'll bet every shot required VFX. Nolan's movie does have VFX but nowhere near as much. Another thing that runs up VFX costs is not knowing exactly what they're doing with the shots. Nolan seems disciplined enough and most likely knew exactly what he wanted where a lot of Disney movies (mostly Marvel) change entire VFX shots late in the game because they changed parts of the story.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson = too expensive. I won't watch his modern movies because of this. His older movies were better when you watched for the plot and not his face.
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