Lights, camera, fraction!

By Alexandra Suich

Marilyn Monroe once said that Hollywood was a place “where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.” Many film stars might feel similarly short-changed in 2015. The era of easy money in Hollywood has toppled over, like a precariously stacked pile of DVDs. Actors can no longer count on studios’ largesse.

Several trends will drive down their earnings. Before people stopped buying their own copies of films to watch at home, deciding instead to stream them or watch them on-demand for a lesser fee, Hollywood studios could (sometimes) afford star actors’ inflated salaries. No longer. Executives are running their film studios with more discipline, at the insistence of their corporate owners, and have stopped dispensing “first-dollar gross”, which entitled actors to big payments even before a film earned back its costs.

The squeeze will only tighten at studios like Sony and Warner Bros, whose parent companies staved off activist-shareholder pressure and corporate suitors in 2014. Studios will make fewer films in 2015, which limits the earning potential of the actors who are lucky enough to find work.

The rise of superhero films has shown how stars are mere mortals. No one needs a superstar to play Superman. Audiences will show up for the character, regardless of who is cast in the role. Studios can use this to talk well-known actors down from high pay demands. In 2015 the consequences of this shift in Hollywood will become clearer, as the ecosystem that depends on actors’ salaries—including agents, managers and lawyers—shows signs of deprivation.

To make ends meet the luckiest actors will star in television shows in 2015. Already some A-list actors have moved into TV, including Kevin Spacey. Long-running television programmes can be even more lucrative than film. Other stars will turn to a once-unglamorous part of television: advertisements. In 2014 Matthew McConaughey, who won an Academy Award for his role in the low-budget “Dallas Buyers Club”, also starred in an hbo television show and a car commercial for Lincoln. Couch potatoes can look forward to more star-sightings like this.

Alexandra Suich New York