vallierojas: Forbes list exposes Hollywood wage gap

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Forbes list exposes Hollywood wage gap

Angelina Jolie may be Hollywood's highest-paid female actor but she trails Leonardo DiCaprio by $47m. What's going on?

Forbes Magazine released its annual list of the top-earning male Hollywood actors this week. Hollywood star salaries have always been out of whack, and whether you can rate an actor's talent by how much they earn is debatable, but the one thing you can say is that a male star's earning power is pretty consistent. Year after year the same guys ? Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio ? appear near the top of a list that celebrates their ability to earn.

This year Leo is the king of the world. He had a very successful 2010 (Forbes's survey covered May 2010-May 2011), with Shutter Island and Inception cumulatively taking more than $1.2bn at the box office and earning DiCaprio $77m. Depp ($50m) and Smith ($36m) didn't do badly either. Even Hollywood veteran Tom Hanks, whose last film Larry Crowne underperformed at the box office, earned a decent wage.

Hanks's earnings look puny compared with DiCaprio's, but his $35m is still $5m more than the earnings of Angelina Jolie and Sarah Jessica Parker, who were tied at the top of last month's womens' list. In fact, Hollywood's female top-earners always lag behind the men. And when they do reach figures similar to those of the highest flyers (Sandra Bullock earned $56m for her roles in The Proposal and The Blind Side last year), they don't tend to earn them for long (Bullock's earnings dropped to $15m this year).

Men tend to star in big-budget movies that earn at the box office. Women can't compete at the same level because they aren't given the same roles. They're not the stars of a Pirates of the Caribbean or Inception, they're the window dressing: girlfriends and sidekicks. And as the foreign market for Hollywood films continues to grow (foreign revenue made up more than 67% of the US's total box office gross in 2010), women will be increasingly shut out of the higher-earning roles. The foreign market is familiar with men blowing things up and wants to see more of it.

In Hollywood, women earn less as they age. Harrison Ford still bags $20m for action roles. If Cowboys & Aliens performs anything like his previous films, we'll see him back on the Forbes list next year. But (as Indiewire's Women and Hollywood blog noted) there are no 69-year-old women earning $20m per film. Sigourney Weaver (63) would probably love to have another crack at an Alien film but, as she said recently, that's not likely to happen: "Just because of the way the industry is." Female actors are therefore under a greater imperative to build their brands beyond the screen, because that's where their future earning potential lies. Parker still makes money as a producer of Sex and the City. She's also branched out into fashion and perfume. Jennifer Aniston is a huge brand outside of her film work.

Jolie is the one woman bucking the trend. She appears in action movies, so gets paid like the guys. They might have switched the gender of Jolie's Salt, but the wage stayed male. And that should give hope to the stars of the new female-friendly franchises that are following her. Kristen Stewart (the Twilight series), Rooney Mara (Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games) are all tied to action franchises that should make big bucks at the box office and will hopefully push their wages up. It's doubtful they'll ever earn Leo's money, but it may at least squeeze the gap.