The Forbes Payback List

THEY both have Oscars and Australian passports, but now Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman have something else in common: according to a new report, they are the most overpaid actors in Hollywood.

While few would challenge their acting abilities, the Gladiator and Moulin Rouge! stars have struggled to justify their position on Hollywood’s A-list of those earning $20m (£9.9m) a film, according to the business magazine Forbes.

The detailed analysis has sparked a furore in Hollywood, where a six-week-old writers’ strike is casting a harsh spotlight on who earns what. “This report is raising tempers and jealousies just when we need peace and calm,” said a disgruntled negotiator last week.

Forbes compares stars’ salaries with the money earned from cinema and DVD sales by their most recent films to produce a measure of their worth to the studio.

Crowe, perhaps typically, is said to be “royally pissed off” by the report. He was acclaimed as the next Marlon Brando when he made a huge impact in such films as LA Confidential and Gladiator, but his box office popularity has faltered since.

At the same time his salary for films such as Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, which failed to launch an expected series based on the books of Patrick O’Brian, has reached $20m. Forbes says the returns on the studio’s investment are “measly”.

It estimates that for every dollar he is paid the film makes $5, compared with the $29 generated by Matt Damon through the Ocean’s Eleven and Bourne trilogies. Damon says he would rather keep his salary down so that he has more freedom to make smaller movies, but Crowe seems to enjoy pricey spectaculars such as a forthcoming version of the Robin Hood legend. There are signs that his fortunes are reviving following Sir Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, which has proved a big hit.

Like Crowe, Kidman, who is named the most “overpaid” Hollywood leading lady, is an immigrant both to Hollywood and to Australia – he was born in New Zealand, she in Hawaii.

Despite her stellar reputation as an Oscar winner, her fame as the former Mrs Tom Cruise and her role in the most expensive advertisement ever filmed – for Chanel No 5 perfume – Kidman has appeared in few block-busters.

She has tried: after years of “arty” films such as The Hours, for which she won her Oscar, Kidman broke into the male-dominated $20m-a-film club with a remake of the 1960s televi-sion series Bewitched.

But the supernatural comedy failed to cast a spell at the box office, and her recent remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Daniel Craig, called The Invasion, and The Stepford Wives proved relatively unsuccessful.

Kidman has tried again in The Golden Compass, in which she plays Marisa Coulter, a luminously beautiful child-torturer, in Britain’s most expensive special effects-laden film.

Last weekend The Golden Compass flopped at the American box office, dimming hopes that the film makers will complete Philip Pullman’s acclaimed fantasy novel trilogy, His Dark Materials. Critics said Kidman and the child star Dakota Blue Richards were let down by overcompressed directing and poor studio marketing. Others more brutally wrote it off as a “turkey”.

The magazine says Kidman’s films earn $8 for every dollar paid to her. By contrast, Jennifer Aniston earns $17 for every dollar risked on her salary and Ange-lina Jolie is just behind at $15.

The overpaid list is dominated by stars of comedies, notoriously the most difficult genre to pull off and yet the least appreciated at Oscar time. After years of mis-fires Jim Carrey is not taking an advance salary for his next film and will be paid only if it becomes profitable.

No talent agent would talk on the record, but they believe the report will be used to hold down stars’ salaries.

“All actors go through rough patches but one film can put them back on top of the world,” said a veteran agent last week. “You just don’t know in advance which film that will be, so you gamble the money.”

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