Scarlett Johansson starred in Black Widow for Marvel/Disney on July 9th.
Her salary was 15 million dollars.
Up from $400,000 which was her original salary when she first joined Marvel in Iron Man 2.
That said though, 15 million dollars is the base pay for Black Widow, with an unannounced back end cut as part of her deal also.
To give an idea of how much backend deals can make…
Robert Downy Jr had 20 million dollars as his base pay for Avengers Endgame. He also had 8% of the profit post budget as part of the deal. That came to an additional 55 million dollars.
Alec Guinness who played Obi-Wan in there first Star Wars movie had two rules for joining. First was his character had to die, so he wouldn’t have to do it again. Second, he’d get 2% of the toy sales. That royalty ended up making 95 million dollars.
Bruce Willis was paid 14 million dollars upfront for the Sixth Sense, but had a backend royalty deal was insane at 17% of earnings. That royalty ended up making Willis 100 million dollars of the Sixth Sense and he to this day is the highest earning actor ever for a single role.
Scarlett Johansson had Black Widow which was set to come out in 2020 and was following up a pretty solid track record for Marvel.
- Captain Marvel 2019 made 1.1 billion.
- Avengers Endgame 2019 made 2.8 billion.
- Spiderman 2019 made 1.1 billion.
Each Marvel film broke 1 billion dollars making it the highest earning streak in history for a film franchise in one studio.
Black Widow was supposed to come out and was likely going to break a billion dollars also.
COVID happened
Movie postponed a year.
Movie likely re-edited.
Biggest thing was distribution changed.
Disney went from offering movies only in theaters on launch to theaters and the Disney+ for people who pay for the premiere pass which is about $30.
Opening weekend, Black Widow made 140 million dollars.
80 million from the box office.
60 million from Disney+.
Problem…
Scarlett Johansson’s contract said the film was to come out exclusively in theaters on launch and no mention of an online release happened.
Disney didn’t follow that due to COVID/growing emphasis on Disney+ and they released the movie with both channels.
Obvious answer would be just giving Scarlett Johansson a cut of the Disney+ sales, but it looks like they’ve not done that.
Making it worse, studios normally have a 50-70% split with theaters with rates changing during regions or months of the year. International releases during the summer can go as high as distributors and theaters taking 80%.
Disney+ has Disney keep every cent of the money coming in with no split.
Even though the product is higher margin, Disney isn’t giving Scarlett Johansson a cut of that.
There’s probably a few things to be said on this about the future of actor salaries, what this means for the future of bonuses with streaming taking over and more, but I’ll just keep it simple and say Disney is sort of ripping her off.
I understand the 15 million in base is a lot, but end of the day, if COVID didn’t happen, this would have been a billion dollar movie and Scarlett would have likely made something like 50-100 million dollars.
Can totally see why she’s suing and it makes sense.
Fun Fact
Emily Blunt was the first person offered the role of Black Widow, but turned it down due to contract issues with the Jack Black movies Gulliver’s Travels.
Gulliver’s Travel’s was paying $500,000 and she could have broken out of it, but her agent told her it’d be a dumb idea to leave for becoming Black Widow.
Emily Blunt has lost close to 100 million dollars from that choice.