From the silent films of Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford to George Clooney’s modern Rat Pack in Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13, Hollywood has always loved a star.

A reckoning may be looming, however. Research suggests that the demands made by A-list actors have turned the movie business into a loss-making industry at the precise moment that it has mislaid its audience at the box office.

A report, Do Movies Make Money?, predicts that the 132 films distributed by the six leading Hollywood studios in 2006 will make a pretax loss of $1.9 billion (£920 million).

The findings by Global Media Intelligence (GMI), an offshoot of Screen Digest, a London-based research company, are based on evidence that revenue growth has stalled after a “golden age” between 2000 and 2004, while costs have ballooned. GMI believes that several of the biggest box office hits of 2006 made an overall loss or failed to return significant profits to their investors. These include Mission: Impossible III, Superman Returns, Dreamgirls and Miami Vice.

Falling DVD sales, increasingly ambitious marketing campaigns and demand for ever more spectacular special effects have all played supporting roles. The leading culprit, however, is the spiralling costs of “gross participation” deals, which can account for up to $100 million on a single film.

Roger Smith, the author of the report and an industry veteran of more than 30 years, said that deals offering top actors, directors and producers a share of the gross revenue from a film have risen steadily in recent years. They are not included in budgets and are paid on top of the star’s official salary. GMI estimates that they cost Hollywood at least $3 billion last year.

The sum dwarfs the $121.3 million paid out in residuals to writers, the payments which are at the centre of the screenwriters’ strike called by the Writers Guild of America last week.

According to Mr Smith, stars such as Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks are typically guaranteed $20 million for a role but are also entitled to 20 per cent of the studio’s slice of the worldwide gross, which can be up to $500 million on a global hit such as Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

“A nine-figure payday is extremely rare, but the high eight figures is not unusual,” Mr Smith said.

GMI calculated that Cruise made $95 million from Mission: Impossible III, which he starred in and produced. The film took just under $400 million at the global box office.

Paramount, the studio that had invested an estimated $150 million in the film, “maybe got $10 million as its share”, Mr Smith said. The studio dumped its most high-profile star soon afterwards, ending a 14-year business relationship.

Investing in films has always been a gamble, with studios traditionally relying on big hits to cover the losses on the rest of their slate. Participation deals are biting by sucking the profitability out of the hits, Mr Smith said. “They make anything short of a wild hit not that profitable. One recently retired studio executive put it to me this way: ‘It isn’t that the losers lose so much; it’s that the winners don’t win enough’.”

The details of individual packages are generally kept secret but Disney, the one studio that does declare the amount it pays out in participations and residuals, spent $554 million on them in 2006, nearly four times more than in 2002.

At the same time the link between star power and box office success is becoming less reliable.

Peter Bart, the editor of Variety, the industry newspaper, wrote last month: “Here’s the new benchmark for predicting box office performance: if a movie star heads the cast, downgrade the forecasts. While movie stars today can help open a picture, they sure as hell can’t guarantee success. Some distributors inevitably ask, has the basic concept of a movie star become something of an anachronism?”

He listed Clooney, Ben Stiller, Jodie Foster, Halle Berry, Brad Pitt, Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Jude Law and Jamie Foxx as A-listers whose recent films have “either underperformed or tanked”.

Of the 15 most successful films at the US box office this year only three were traditional star vehicles: The Bourne Ultimatum with Matt Damon, Live Free or Die Hard with Bruce Willis and Wild Hogs, a motorcycle comedy with John Travolta.

Despite record-breaking showings at the global box office this summer from blockbusters such as Spider-Man 3 and Transformers, the most talked-about success stories in studio circles have been the likes of Knocked Up and Disturbia, low-budget films with no stars or gimmicks.

Mike Gubbins, the editor of Screen International, said: “The studios have spent a fortune this summer and I’m not sure the box office justifies it. Their success has been unrealistically paid for, which is why there is a growing interest in backing smaller films which can offer good returns without the studio having to bet the bank.”

A-list and their hits

— Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest $423,315,812 Johnny Depp

— Spider-Man 3 $336,530,303 Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst

— Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix $291,808,642 Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson

— Night at the Museum $250,863,268 Ben Stiller, Robin Williams

— Men: The Last Stand $234,362,462 Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen

— The Bourne Ultimatum $227,015,425 Matt Damon

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