Jerome Cukier

a couple of days ago I posted the contribution of relative keywords to the earnings of a given movie.

Well, it occurs that the cast of a movie is much easier to obtain than keywords and much less messy. So, I also had scraped the 4 lead actors for each movie of the Beautiful Information awards in order to determine their contribution.

I’ve done it slightly differently than with the keywords. I’ve also taken the budget of the movie into account. So, in order to predict the earnings of a movie, you take the budget, multiply it by 3, remove 8 millions and then add (or remove) the contribution of each star.

Since the movie budget already (mostly ) includes the pay of the lead actors, the way to read this contribution is how much extra these actor should be paid when they appear on film. For instance, each time Emma Stone does her thing, it would be fair to pay her $500k more.

the bang being a modest 500k pay raise.

Likewise, Kirsten Dunst here could be paid an extra 200k per movie, like Rebecca Hall or Rooney Mara. But I mostly felt like posting a picture of Kirsten to stand up against what google autosuggests as keywords when you look her up.

Kirsten, too, should be paid more.

Nicolas Cage, somewhat unsurprisingly,  should refund $2.44m for each movie he stars in.

Actors of movies who’ve done exceedingly well such as Avatar or the Harry Potter or Twilight sagas, movies which, it’s fair to say, owe their success to more than the actors, come out of this over valued. And because of how this is calculated, actors who have costarred with them in less ambitious movies come out undervalued: for instance, Elizabeth Banks or Anton Yelchin who both played with Sam Worthington are “paying” the fact that Man on the Ledge or Terminator: Renaissance haven’t been as successful as Avatar.

Twilight fans take note, though, that Harry Potter actors are considered more valuable.

Now – the data.