Adam Sandler Named Most Overpaid Actor of 2014

MovieWeb

By Brian Gallagher

Published Dec 24, 2014

Adam Sandler's last three movies have returned just $3.20 for every dollar paid to the actor, making him the most overpaid man in hollywood.

The end of December is full of lists, highlighting the best and worst aspects of the year, in practically every aspect of our society, including movies. While the nation's critics have been filing their top 10 lists over the past few weeks, Forbes offers their own top 10, analyzing which Hollywood actors are the most overpaid. For the second year in a row, Adam Sandler has topped the list, "beating out" stars such as Johnny Depp and Ben Stiller. Here's an excerpt from Forbes' story, where they explain how they came up with this list.

"To compile our rundown of Hollywood's Most Overpaid Actors we use earnings estimates from our Celebrity 100 list. We look at the last three films each actor starred in before June 2014, since that was the end of our time frame for the Celeb 100. We don't include animated films or movies where the actor appears in a cameo or a very small role, or movies that were released on fewer than 2,000 screens. We then look at the budget and revenue for each film (using numbers from Box Office Mojo and other sources) to come up with operating income. We add together the total compensation for each star on the three movies and the operating income from each movie and then divide to come up with the final return on investment number."

By this criteria, Adam Sandler's last three movies have returned, on average, $3.20 for every dollar he was paid. In the site's brief description under the actor's #1 entry, it listed last year's Grown Ups 2 as his "latest movie," so it seems they didn't take into account this year's Blended, which opened just a week before the site's June 2014 cutoff. Blended earned $126 million worldwide from just a $40 million production budget, so it's possible that, if these figures were added in, Adam Sandler wouldn't be at the top of this list, although it isn't exactly clear how much the actor was paid for starring in the comedy. It's also worth noting that Adam Sandler signed a deal with Netflix in October to create four movies exclusively for the streaming service, so it's possible we may be seeing less of him on the big screen in the years to come. Take a look at the 10 most overpaid actors of 2014 below.