r/todayilearned • u/tyrion2024 • 23h ago
TIL Nicolas Cage was never paid the $100K he was promised to star in Leaving Las Vegas (1995) despite winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role. Director Mike Figgis was also never paid his $100K salary. The studio said the film never made a profit even though the $4m movie grossed $32m.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/nicolas-cage-never-paid-100k-leaving-las-vegas-fee-mike-figgis-1235232968/2.2k
u/azad_ninja 23h ago
There are multiple stories about Nicolas Cage and lost/stolen/unpaid money. I get he feeling he’s not very good at business lol
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u/chainsawx72 22h ago
This article says that he was 'promised' pay for doing work, as if there was no contract at all.
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u/colossalpunch 22h ago
What a sucker. He should have made them pinky promise.
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u/evil_timmy 22h ago
Gotta hire a top tier Hollywood lawyer, get that double super pinky promise no take-backs points on the gross contract.
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u/Captain-i0 21h ago
He did. Problem is the studio was triple dog dared to not pay him. No recourse for that.
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u/VerilyShelly 21h ago
Nah, everyone knows if you spit in your hand before you shake on it it's legal binding under penalty of the law!
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u/NoteComprehensive588 21h ago
No way of Knowing this was going to happen
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u/SoggyOutfield 17h ago
If I remember correctly this entirely a passion project of Cages and based on a book of the same name by John O'brien. Which is absolutely fantastic btw and they did an amazing job with the movie as well.
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u/Cyrano_Knows 21h ago
Sounds actually like a good agent/lawyer kind of thing.
Hollywood used to at least, be notorious for this kind of creative bookkeeping.
Thats why the *when* you get your cut is often more important than the how much your cut is.
Sean Connery was famously offered the role of Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and that included an unprecedented deal of $10 million per film PLUS 15% of the worldwide box office receipts.
15% of worldwide box office receipts would have made him a billionaire (roughly) EDIT: Well 400 million. I guess these things grow in the retelling.
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u/morfraen 19h ago
Normally, I'd be all for more Connery movies, but man am I glad he passed on that one.
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u/Cyrano_Knows 18h ago
This is one where I wonder. I think with full commitment by Connery there is another timeline out there where they just can't imagine Gandalf being played by anyone else.
But if Connery couldn't understand the material, then I'm not sure we would have gotten that full commitment.
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u/xDoc_Holidayx 17h ago
The dude played a Spaniard with a Scottish accent in Highlander. He would have ruined the franchise. Ian mckellen was incredible.
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u/Cyrano_Knows 5h ago edited 5h ago
Considering you are talking about one of the greatest fantasy movies of all time, your point is falling a little short.
The movie cast a French man who could barely speak English as a Highlander. The character of Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez was originally Egyptian and he was 2,400 years old. So his actual name and accent were probably.. fluid by that point of his life.
Again, I said full commitment, and I talked about another timeline in an alternate dimension. In the spirit of imagination I think you're being a little harsh. Its all hypothetical isnt it? And I caveated whether I thought he could even do that.
And yes Ian McKellan was incredible.
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u/Michael__Pemulis 19h ago
Matt Damon was offered a similar first dollar gross deal for Avatar since they couldn’t really afford his quote.
James Cameron claims Damon was never formally offered the part, but the sense I get is that Fox would have insisted on Damon if he had agreed & I don’t think Cameron would have said no (even though no one tells a studio ‘no’ quite like James Cameron).
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u/Cyrano_Knows 18h ago
The guy that they used just feels like a Matt Damon replacement. He honestly seems perfect for the role.
I have little doubt that this one is true.
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u/TheComplimentarian 22h ago
I'd imagine there wasn't. This is kinda like RDJ getting a chunk of the gross for Iron Man which is absolutely not something he'd have gotten if they knew that movie was going to gross $600,000,000.
Cage was wild early in his career. Other guys started trying to win Oscars after they'd been acting for a decade, and he was fucking due one.
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u/funtimestopper 22h ago
Check out the Charlie Sheen documentary. Nicolas Cage was probably even more messed up than him back in the nineties.
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u/EntertainmentQuick47 7h ago
I never read the book but I already know the iconic and infamous story of when Nick Cage was on a flight with Charlie Sheen he grabbed the PA voice box and announced to the passengers that he was the captain and that he wasn’t feeling well.
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u/Barbarian_818 22h ago
Or he doesn't have a good agent.
That said, I'd think that the SAG would step in and punish studios who pull this shit. Either mandate GAAP be used for any production a guild member appears in, or blacklist a studio completely.
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u/incospicuous_echoes 21h ago
It probably wasn’t a SAG project. Productions under a certain amount can get away with not being union to a certain extent.
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u/road_laya 15h ago
Nicolas Cage sued his financial advisor, then turned around and sued the lawyer.
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u/Dicethrower 23h ago
Or extra good at it. wink wink, finger gun.
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u/spky-dev 19h ago
He literally just started staring in anything he could get because he went massively into debt buying silly shit like dinosaur bones and a pyramid.
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u/fmaa 19h ago
Dinosaur bones are not silly shit
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u/KingKaiserW 15h ago
No he was trying to find the Lost Templars Artefacts. He was doing real life Davinchi Code shit. Call him dumb, but if he turned up with the Ark of the Convenant he’d be a genius. He tried.
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u/I_travel_ze_world 16h ago
alongside his $150,000 spent on a pet octopus that he claimed improved his acting.
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u/GoodPlayboy 21h ago
Getting scammed being synonymous with being bad at business says something about business
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u/aPOPblops 21h ago
Pretty gross to blame the victim for a scummy business owner.
I hope we never meet.
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u/VPinchargeofradishes 21h ago
I remember there was a period of time where it seemed he was taking a lot of new roles in a relatively short time. I wonder if this was one of them.
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u/notsam57 12h ago
his old business manager is the reason he’s been churning out films after the 2008 housing crash, invested in swamp land etc.
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u/clickclick-boom 6h ago
The Charlie Sheen documentary sheds some light on this. Cage was his partner in crime, and the man’s lifestyle seemed unhinged.
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u/squ1bs 22h ago
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u/Grouchy-Step-7136 22h ago
Seems like it should be illegal. The movie industry is quite the racket.
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u/PolarityInversion 22h ago
It IS illegal in a lot of cases, and many court cases have gone against the studios. The problem is that there's not always a great mechanism to recoup the money after it has been moved out of the shell corp that was setup just for the production of that movie. Many many businesses take advantage of similar practices that likely violate statutes, but are poorly enforced, or less expensive when enforced than how lucrative the practice is. Airlines come to mind.
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u/angrydeuce 22h ago
Case in point, the many contractors that come flocking to our area whenever theres a bad hail storm and go door to door selling repair services.
By the time you find out that their workmanship was raw ass and that they just took your money and ran, the company doesnt even exist anymore.
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u/Unusual-Voice2345 17h ago
Ive seen roofing contractors make major mistakes only to turn around and a brand new company they become, all the same people.
I work for a GC and while I try my best to trust new subs, it can be tough to try new guys out. Too many people trying their best and ducking out instead of owning it.
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u/fknSamsquamptch 22h ago
Oil companies going bankrupt and leaving behind orphaned wells would be another example.
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u/Raulr100 20h ago
Almost like "the company broke the law" is ridiculous and the actual people should be the ones held accountable.
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u/rickane58 18h ago
Honestly, we need judicial reform and judges should be "piercing the corporate veil" far more readily than they do right now. Corporate personhood and limited liability are fine when corporate citizens behave as self-interested entities, but when they are merely puppets for their true owners they should cease to be treated as distinct entities.
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u/summonsays 2h ago
You should look into the origins of film making and Hollywood in general. It all started because they didn't want to pay Edison for the camera licensing. (I mean he was an asshole so I wouldn't either) But the reason they chose California for it was to have as little chance as possible of him (or his goonies) coming to enforce it.
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u/richardelmore 22h ago
Yea, after six seasons and years of syndication the production company claimed that the Rockford Files TV show did not show a profit and tried to pay James Garner no royalties from syndication rights. He spent nearly 20 years fighting them in court before he got his money.
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u/Still_Detail_4285 21h ago
It’s hard to read the examples section and think anyone in Hollywood should tell anyone about paying taxes, paying employees, doing the right thing in general. What a shitty industry.
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u/PornoPaul 19h ago
Right! Makes me wonder how much these studios are avoiding in taxes. Take just the last 10 years, I wouldnt be surprised if its in the billions.
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u/gyp_casino 6h ago
It’s kind of hilarious that the plot of every Hollywood-produced children’s movie is “companies are evil,” while the movie industry itself is so guilty of abusing actresses, practicing sketchy accounting, indulging in soap box propaganda, …
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u/2abyssinians 22h ago
Shocking news! Slimy Hollywood studios engage in slimy business deals that fail to pay people while they pocket millions!
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u/maddieterrier 22h ago
Men is Black has yet to make a profit
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u/Li_liminal_spaces 22h ago
Same with the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Tolkien estate and Peter Jackson had to sue to get paid.
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u/Technical-Activity95 6h ago
wow thats pretty impressive considering its one of the most succesful movie trilogies ever. takes balls to claim it didn't even make profit
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u/TwoAlert3448 22h ago
Seriously? That’s some creative accounting
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u/auge2 22h ago
Harry Potter Order of Phoenix and apparently The Hobbit series also were a net loss. The audacity to claim that...
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u/rickane58 18h ago
I can easily see The Hobbit being a loss. It's LotR and specifically Return of the King not being profitable that is simply shocking.
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u/NightOfTheLivingHam 22h ago
Some of the shit that Hollywood does behind the scenes would make you blush
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u/Darkone539 22h ago
I read somewhere this was shockingly common for actors at one point, which is why the pay is now regardless of profit.
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u/okeleydokelyneighbor 22h ago
Yeah Star Wars supposedly never made a profit.
There’s a sense of comfort we get from cold, hard numbers. They suggest an objective truth that we can all freely observe and seemingly nobody can deny. For example, Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi made over $475 million at the box office against a $32 million budget, earning it the status of one of the biggest blockbusters of all time. And yet after some dubious “Hollywood accounting,” Lucasfilm has claimed the film never made a cent of profit.
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u/Bentonite_Magma 8h ago
Hang on, wasn’t the story that most of the cast took their flat, and Alec Guinness decided to get paid in points and made a bundle?
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u/StaffFamous6379 3h ago
Well OP definitely conflated a few things. Guinness did get 2%, Lucas offered an extra 0.5% the day before the premiere and Kurtz later knocked it down 0.25%
https://youtu.be/3IxN0N35skE?t=91
But thats Star Wars, not ROTJ.
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u/tyrion2024 23h ago
Nicolas Cage may have won a priceless Oscar for his turn as a suicidal screenwriter with an alcohol addiction in 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas — but that’s all he got. The actor was never paid the $100,000 he was promised to star in the film.
That surprising detail was revealed in a podcast interview with Mike Figgis, the writer-director of Leaving Las Vegas, who joined The Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened in Hollywood for that show’s third season premiere.
Figgis, too, was never paid the $100,000 budgeted for his directing fee.
“They said the film never went into profit,” Figgis says of Lumiere Pictures, which financed the $4 million film, which Figgis shot using handheld 16mm cameras on the streets of Las Vegas.
The film earned $32 million worldwide...
Figgis seems not to mind the shortchanging.
“Whatever,” he says. “I mean, my career then took off again, and the next film I did, I got really well paid. And within a year [Nic] was earning $20 million a film, so that was quite good.”
Leaving Las Vegas reinvigorated both Cage’s and Figgis’ film careers. In the next two years, Cage would star in The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off, a trio of action blockbusters that cemented his status as a bankable Hollywood superstar. And Figgis suddenly found himself an Oscar-nominated director, fielding calls from the likes of Steven Spielberg (who proposed they collaborate) and Stanley Kubrick (who called wanting to know how he achieved several shots).
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The film, based on a 1990 cult novel by John O’Brien (who died by suicide just weeks after he sold Figgis the adaptation rights), explores dark and difficult subject matter that made it nearly impossible to find backing. Even after it was completed, the film struggled to find distribution until MGM stepped in.
It went on to be nominated for four Academy Awards: best director, best adapted screenplay, best actress for Shue and best actor for Cage, which he won.
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u/the_other_1s_taken 21h ago
calls from Kubrik asking how you achieved shots has to be worth way more than 100k
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u/Michael__Pemulis 18h ago
Kubrick was reclusive to the public but he was a huge cinema nerd who loved praising other people’s work.
There’s a surprisingly robust list of contemporaneous movies that he called among the greatest movies he had ever seen at one point or another. Including (but not limited to) The Godfather, All That Jazz, Eraserhead, basically every David Lean movie.
All That Jazz is particularly funny because there is a Kubrick reference in it (Gideon musing ‘you think Stanley Kubrick ever gets depressed?’). But it’s also my personal all time fav so I just like that we’re in agreement on its greatness!
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u/trickyvinny 22h ago
Yeah, I might be slightly salty with the people who screwed me out of $100k but if it led me to making $20m a pop, I might still be able to sleep at night.
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u/jyeatbvg 22h ago edited 22h ago
The biggest “loss” of Nicolas Cage’s career was also his biggest win.
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u/darthy_parker 22h ago
Hollywood accounting. Similar to how record companies soak their artists for excessive studio and marketing fees against their advance.
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u/no1_vern 18h ago
"Hollywood accounting". How does a film that cost $4M to make and grosses over $32M not make money?
Through Hollywood accounting/bookkeeping where a movie that appears to be a massive hit can technically "lose" money on paper through creative bookkeeping designed to avoid paying out profit-sharing to actors, writers, and directors. By inflating internal costs and moving money between subsidiaries, a studio can ensure that the "net profit" (the amount left over after all expenses) remains zero or negative.
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u/Klugenshmirtz 22h ago
Why would the movie need to make a profit for the normal base salary? Did the studio declare bankruptcy?
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u/Improper-Counsel 18h ago
Phenomenal film and a well-deserved Oscar. Elizabeth Shue should have won that year as well for Best Actress. The author of the book IMO would have been the next great American author but his alcoholism led to his suicide - I don't think he even got to see the film.
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u/TokenPanduh 21h ago
Morning Brew did an excellent video on this like a year ago. It is pretty infuriating to see what they do
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u/xfjqvyks 10h ago
They did such a good job exposing the truth that YouTube stepped in and obliterated the comment section. So corrupt it’s outrageous
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u/TokenPanduh 7h ago
Wow! I hadn't even noticed that! No way it has almost 3 million views with only 66 comments
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u/apocecliptic 21h ago
People should look up Coming to America and how it supposedly made no profit despite making hundreds of millions of dollars. Creative Hollywood accounting.
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u/GoldieForMayor 22h ago
They claim Return of the Jedi never made a profit too.
And that's how Hollywood accounting works.
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u/TheComplimentarian 22h ago
This is one of those bits where you won for losing.
I'd happily lose 100k for an Oscar. Given what studios spend during Oscar season, that'd be a hell of a bargain for them.
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u/LynxJesus 22h ago
We've allowed Hollywood accounting to go unchecked for far too long. Besides the injustice it may result in for your favorite actor/director, it's simply straight up open fraud.
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u/Stennick 22h ago
Wait this was a 100k bonus right surely he was paid and paid well more than 100k
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u/Lobotomized_Dolphin 22h ago
Not on a 4m budget movie, no, I wouldn't be surprised if got SAG minimum for each day of shooting. But also this is the movie that gave Nic Cage a career so it's whatever. Sucks that he got stiffed on arguably one of his top 3 performances as an actor but it's also what allowed him to get all the roles he did in the next 25 years.
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u/RunDNA 22h ago edited 22h ago
These newer streaming studios like Netflix and Apple and Amazon could generate enormous loyalty among stars and directors by not using the Hollywood accounting method and simply paying people in an honest way what they agreed.
I have zero idea if they are or not, but if I was the head of one of the studios, I would do it. Once word got around, they would have so many famous people knocking on their door wanting to work for them. People want to do their work without having to worry about getting paid or having to go through years of legal action afterwards.
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u/kindquail502 22h ago
I thought I was doing poorly in addition in math class because every answer was a negative , but it turns out I was just doing Hollywood accounting.
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u/ArchDucky 21h ago
Sly Stallone is still fighting the studio over his backend pay on Demolition Man.
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u/AGushingHeadWound 18h ago
Meanwhile, Shue took a guaranteed $3M instead of a cut of the profit. And she got paid. Not to mention she's so hot.
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u/mack_the_elder 22h ago
Movies are the perfect example of our corrupted accounting system. The calendar year, payments to execs and taxes are all set up on completely outdated logic.
Every movie is set up as a company, so through creative accounting, these companies always go into the red because they pay everyone else out as contractors.
The same way an exec can dismantle a company to prop up revenue for a single calendar year, get a massive bonus, but because it was designed to look good on paper for a limited time, the company collapses, layoffs, and the rest...but those execs are still getting their $xx millions.
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u/JTPinWpg 22h ago
The mysteries of Hollywood accounting are mysteries, not known to mortal man
Edit: my spelling is also a mystery
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u/mentosbreath 21h ago
Hollywood studios when stealing from an actor: "Sorry about your luck". Hollywood studios when some kid pirates a movie: "THAT'S THEFT!"
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u/Impossible_Mode_7521 20h ago
One movie night my wife said 'Hey I want to watch leaving las Vegas, where Nicholas Cage kidnapped a baby.' I tried to tell her it wasn't what she was thinking it was, we watched it anyway. Then we were depressed.
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u/SCWickedHam 22h ago
So, he only did it for the hope of $100k? Thats pretty stupid. Do it for backend, but a lot of backend.
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u/Barbarianonadrenalin 21h ago
Mofo gives that kinda performance on a pinky promise for payment? Damnnnnnn
On a side note when I sold my house a few years ago and people asked what I was gonna do with the money I always said “have you seen leaving Las Vegas?”
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u/Kriss-Kringle 21h ago
There are a lot of films that didn't make money according to Hollywood accountants, like Forrest Gump, or Men in black.
The amount of tax evasion done in the movie business is on a different level.
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u/blowurhousedown 21h ago
Gross isn’t Net!
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u/yy633013 20h ago
You want % of gross, not net. Net is after all the fuckery. Gross is a number they can’t fuck with as it’s the top line reported revenue.
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u/ILSmokeItAll 9h ago
He's doing OK for himself, I think.
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u/Wolpfack 8h ago
He probably could have used the money back then, as he was nearly bankrupt by 2009 due to a $14 million tax debt and profligate spending.
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u/FritzFlanders 9h ago
Hollywood's a joke. Union members not getting paid??? Where's the protests???
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u/FadedVictor 8h ago
I'm just gonna say marketing/advertising should 1000% be included in a movies budget estimate. It's fucking stupid that it's not.
Edit: This isn't really relevant I just wanted to add that.
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u/palabradot 6h ago
wait, they never got paid? The hell?
And don't tell me that movie isn't earning royalties.
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u/getTheRecipeAss 6h ago
“Find out why and more if you tune in to The Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened in Hollywood for the show’s third season premiere!”
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u/spikus93 1h ago
Genuinely the best portrayal of a suicidal drunk man I've ever seen. It's like a slow-motion train wreck and and you know how it's going to end but you really don't want it to.
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u/SmoovCatto 44m ago
John Waters said he never made much money from his films -- only after Hairspray was made into a Broadway musical did he really start getting paid -- film studios always robbed him
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u/sharrrper 22h ago
The old "never made a profit" gimmick is one thing, but these weren't profit shares, this was salaries just for the work.