You want success? Try playing exactly the same yammering, flab-faced huckster character in every film you star in.
It seems to work for Vince Vaughn, because he’s just been named as Forbes‘ most valuable actor. For every dollar that Vince Vaughn was paid for Dodgeball, The Break-Up and Wedding Crashers, he pulled in $14.71 of gross income for his studios.
That’s impressive stuff, and Vince Vaughn should be incredibly proud of his achievements. Speaking of which, Vince Vaughn should also be incredibly proud next year when Forbes calculates his salary against Fred Claus and that awful-looking Christmas movie he’s making with Reese Witherspoon and names him as its most overpaid one-note, off-script, pointlessly rambling unfunny egobeast.
Goodness, when did Hollywood get so money-fixated? This week we haven’t been able to turn around without seeing Hollywood’s smug face crowing about The Dark Knight being the biggest film ever or how much money Will Smith makes. It upsets us, especially since we think this obsession with money will eventually drive out smaller movies that deal with serious social issues, like all the little Eddie Murphys who live inside the head of a bigger Eddie Murphy.
But when every little aspect of filmmaking is analysed and cost-calculated to within an inch of its life, you’re bound to throw up an anomaly or two. Which brings us along nicely to the fact that Vince Vaughn has just been named as the most valuable star in Hollywood.
It’s a simple enough idea – you take the salary of an actor and the gross of the films they’ve starred in and see how many audience dollars you can get for every one that the actor was paid. Last year Matt Damon was named as the most valuable star, for example. And this year it’s Vince Vaughn.
Why? Because Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up were all huge hits, despite one of them being suicide-inducingly crap, and they were made when Vince Vaughn couldn’t demand ridiculously large fees just to turn up and tediously ad-lib through every scene ignoring everything in the script. The Associated Press reports:
Vaughn raked in $14.73 of gross income for studios for every dollar he was paid for “The Break-up,” “Wedding Crashers” and “Dodgeball.” “That’s because until recently his salary was relatively low, and the films he was in had modest budgets yet did extremely well at the box office worldwide,” Forbes said.
That’s likely to be the only taste of success that Vince Vaughn will get in this field, because now he’s one of the most highly-paid actors in Hollywood, and he makes dreck like Fred Claus – pretty much a failure on all counts – and the dreadful-sounding Four Christmases, chances are his score is going to bottom out quite spectacularly soon.
Still, if that happens Vince Vaughn shouldn’t worry – math-based formulas like this are no indication of acting talent. Look at the bottom of the list – Nicole Kidman only brings in $1.01 for every dollar she’s paid, and she’s won an Oscar. True, we wouldn’t pay to see any of her movies if you waterboarded us into it, but that’s not the point. Is it?