Well, there’s your first mistake. Walt Disney Pictures bet around $300 million on John Carter and $225 million on The Lone Ranger being franchise-igniting hits. Somebody there thought century-old icons were due for a fat comeback, against all evidence to the contrary. And Disney knows their market as well as anyone does. Look at how they’ve done with their first two Star Wars movies. They learned a lesson that George Lucas forgot: don’t blow all your budget on VFX and production design while forgetting to start out with a non-stupid script. That was all they had to remember, and so they did. But the hit factory, however well researched, is always a crap shoot. Even Pixar’s record ain’t perfect, though it’s better than anyone else’s.
No, a better description would be “self-serving and dishonest.” Do you suppose New Line’s Lord of the Rings movies were profitable? How about 20th Century Fox’s Star Wars movies? The studios apparently didn’t think so, and had to be sued by certain actors, writers, and a director in order to pay up what was owed them. Is that simple, properly-operating capitalism at work? Is that sound, rational fiscal policy? Maybe only if the scam is still profitable if it covers the legal bills too?
I don’t think your understanding of how capitalism works accurately reflects the reasons why women actors are typically paid less than their male counterparts. When Jim Carrey became the first actor to be paid $20 million for a movie role (for The Cable Guy in 1996), he was obviously the hottest property in town. He’d already been paid $10 million of the entire $17 million budget of Dumb and Dumber a couple years previously, and that movie had gone on to make $247 million… and not really because it had Jeff Daniels in it. The Cable Guy only made $103 million, so Columbia made less than half the box office on The Cable Guy than New Line made on Dumb and Dumber while investing twice as much in Carrey. Did that make him a crappier investment? Hell no. Arguably, the box office for The Cable Guy would have been a tiny fraction of what it ended up making, if any other actor had been cast in Carrey’s role.
But it established a precedent: that became Carrey’s price, and eventually other actors got up into that range. But it’s always a crapshoot. The Majestic tanked. So did The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. The Number 23 didn’t do all that great. Carrey isn’t always worth what he costs. At that level, who could be?
But I stray afield. Let me continue in a moment.
