Get into bed with Vince Vaughn if you want a box office hit

By Guy Adams in Los Angeles

Friday, 25 July 2008

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The success of The Break Up put Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston in the Forbes Top 10

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He has never won an Oscar, last appeared in a hit two years ago and his celebrity stock nosedived after a messy split from Jennifer Aniston. But the actor Vince Vaughn was yesterday the toast of Hollywood after being unexpectedly identified as the film industry's best-value star.

Research by Forbes magazine revealed that Vaughn, star of films such as Wedding Crashers, Dodgeball and The Break-Up, made his employers an average of $14.73 (£7.40) for every dollar he was paid, putting him at the top of the magazine's annual "Ultimate Star Payback" league table.

Vaughn's trademark goofy charm made him three times more profitable than more established actors such as Will Smith (who was 21st on the list with $5.64) and Tom Cruise (33rd in the list with $3.99) and and a considerably better investment than Nicole Kidman, who was last on the list following three expensive box-office flops – The Golden Compass, Bewitched and The Invasion.

To an industry reeling from the effects of the recent actors' strike and America's wider economic slowdown, the Forbes list serves to highlight the often unjustified excesses of its star system. According to the magazine's commentary, many stars refuse to contemplate leaving the master bedroom of their Beverly Hills mansion without first being offered upwards of $10m in salary, plus a percentage of the film's takings. Many actors towards the bottom of the 35-strong list are finding it increasingly hard to justify their pay-cheques. Jennifer Lopez and Cameron Diaz (31st and 32nd respectively) pay back just $4 for every dollar they are paid – which, after overheads are taken into account, can leave studios in the red.

Vaughn, by contrast, has tended to make more modest financial demands on his employers. "Until recently, his salary was relatively low," said Forbes, "and the films he was in, like Wedding Crashers, had modest budgets yet did extremely well at the box office worldwide."

Tobey Maguire, who came second on the list, owes his position to the Spider-Man sequels, which were among the most successful films in history.

Most of the actors in the lower reaches of the list tend to appear in "star vehicles", for which they receive a relatively high salary.

Among the success stories, Brad Pitt ($12.73), Matt Damon ($12.16) and George Clooney ($11.56) made it into the top 10 thanks largely to their decision to take a cut from their normal pay to star in Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen.

The list was compiled by looking at each star's last three films that opened in at least 1,000 theatres before 2008 and were made in the last five years.

Forbes calculated the gross income for each film by adding half of the worldwide box office and the first three months of wholesale DVD revenues and then subtracting its budget. Gross income was divided by the actor's total compensation to derive his or her "payback" figure.

In separate research published this week, Forbes also identified the top 10 highest-earning male and female stars. Will Smith is the best-paid actor in the film industry, earning an estimated $80m a year, ahead of Johnny Depp ($72m) and Leonardo DiCaprio ($45m).

As if to prove Hollywood is still a man's town, the best actors out-earned the best actresses by a ratio of two to one. Collectively, the industry's leading men took home $487m between 1 June 2007 and 1 June 2008; its leading women managed $244.5m.

Actors' 'payback'

How much a film studio earns back from each dollar that they have paid to a star

THE TOP 10

Vince Vaughn $14.73

Tobey Maguire $13.44

Julia Roberts $13.19

Brad Pitt $12.73

Naomi Watts $12.16

Matt Damon $12.16

George Clooney $11.56

Jennifer Aniston $10.48

Hugh Jackman $9.90