July
23
Vaughn Leads Forbes Star Value Chart
Wouldn't it be great if stars were penalized for making flops, and were paid based on their actual marquee value? Of course, it takes all kinds of stars to fuel Hollywood movies. All stars are not created equal. Despite what this Forbes chart says, Will Smith is still worth a great deal. Many movies would not get made without the guarantee of a star--which means serious coin when there aren't enough of these special talents to go around.
This Forbes list basically penalizes the top-paid stars. So those who get paid less, like Vince Vaughn, who Forbes claims brings the best star value for the price, get a leg up here. This chart mixes apples and oranges anyway. Tobey Maguire means one thing when he's Spider-Man, and another when he's not. Ensemble movies like the Oceans series are not comparable to star vehicles, etc.
But all in all this is a fun corrective to the Hollywood madness: the warped, inflated, broken economic model that is disintegrating before our eyes. The agencies and producers know it. Hollywood studio execs and filmmakers are probably still in denial. But the good old days are over.
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I used to think of Hollywood as "Sad Town" --
now in the same mental frame of reference, I refer to it as "The Haunted House." I love movies, was working all the time in Sad Town.
But I can't get arrested lately in The Haunted House. Somebody not in the business at all recently told me they thought that the movie business was "creepy." That gave me pause and some sort of validation for how I view it. It has to get better eventually. For the next generation. Perhaps they will all be like singer-songwriters and bands -- making their own DVDs, marketing them on MySpace, Facebook, etc.. The studios will become irrelevant except for the biggest, most bloated extravaganzas and the few surviving great filmmakers.
Posted by: Tom | July 23, 2008 at 08:02 PM
I'm still not sure how they arrive at the ranking, since a great deal of it doesn't seem to make any sense. Tobey Maguire is a great example of how it can get thrown off.
Posted by: Liz | July 23, 2008 at 11:04 PM
I suspect your view of the future is not far off.
Posted by: anne Thompson | July 24, 2008 at 12:19 AM