Bringing in the big bucks
Wahlberg is the top-earning actor of 2017.
MARK Wahlberg (pic) is sitting on top of the Rock on Forbes’ 2017 highest-paid actors list.
The rapper-turned-actor earned an estimated US$68mil (RM291mil) between June 2016 and June 2017, the financial mag reported last week, edging out last year’s top earner, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
That figure sums up the Boston native’s paydays from the forthcoming comedy Daddy’s Home 2 and action flick Transformers: The Last Knight, plus earnings from his AT&T endorsement deal and his family’s A&E reality series, Wahlburgers. Incidentally, his Transformers outing was the lowest-grossing film of the franchise to date.
Johnson dropped to the No. 2 spot this year with US$65mil (RM278mil), thanks to earnings from his tentpole films Baywatch and Jumanji. That’s still a modest improvement from the Fate Of The Furious star and producer’s US$64.5mil (RM276mil) payout from 2016, which saw him displace three-time list-topper Robert Downey Jr.
Speaking of Iron Man, the Avengers star dropped to the No. 6 spot this year with US$48mil (RM205mil). However, his Marvel Cinematic Universe brethren – Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner, Chris Pratt and Vin Diesel – all placed in the magazine’s top 20.
Diesel, who also served as F8’s star and producer and voiced baby Groot in Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2, clinched this year’s No. 3 spot with US$54.5mil (RM233mil).
Despite Adam Sandler’s critically maligned Netflix films, his lucrative production deal with the streaming service kept him in the top five. The comedian landed in the fourth spot on the list by earning an estimated US$50.4mil (RM215mil).
Just behind him is Chinese action star Jackie Chan, who earned an estimated US$49mil (RM210mil). Downey, Tom Cruise and Bollywood stars Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan and Akshay Kumar rounded out the top 10.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the actors still significantly out-earn their female counterparts. La La Land star and O scar winner Emma Stone topped Forbes’ list of highest-paid actresses last week, but her earnings – US$26mil (RM111mil), compared with Wahlberg’s US$68mil – further highlight Hollywood’s wage gap.
The top 10 actors banked a cumulative US$488.5mil (RM2.1bil) – nearly three times as much as the US$172.5mil (RM734mil) combined total of the 10 top-earning women, Forbes noted.
The three highest-paid actresses – Stone, Hunger Games and X-Men star Jennifer Lawrence and Friends alum Jennifer Aniston – were the only ones to pocket more than US$20mil (RM85mil) within a year. Meanwhile, 16 actors surpassed that mark in the latest list.
Forbes tallies the estimated earnings based on data from Nielsen, ComScore, Box O ffice Mojo, IMDB and interviews with industry insiders. All figures are pretax and before fees for agents, managers and lawyers are deducted. – Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service O N this day in 2001, singer Aaliyah died in a plane crash in the Bahamas. She was 22.
Aaliyah was in the Bahamas to record a music video for her new single Rock The Boat. Eight others were killed in the same incident including a family friend, members of her record company and a make-up artist.
Among those who attended Aaliyah’s funeral service in New York were celebrities and superstars such as Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Gladys Knight and Sean Combs.
Tributes also poured in from the likes of Beyonce, Jay-Z and her Romeo Must Die co-star Jet Li who described her as “wonderful and talented artiste” in a statement to E! News.
In 2006, Li revealed in an interview with IGN that he was still haunted by thoughts of Aaliyah while filming a new movie, in Vancouver, Canada.
“I have some memories of this very beautiful city but it still makes me think about Aaliyah. She was such a talented girl and some locations when you pass by every day, you still think about her,” he said.
Super producer Timbaland, who worked with Aaliyah on hits like Are You That Somebody and Try Again, said in a recent interview that he’ll always remember her one of his best collaborators.
“Aaliyah will always be the top because that was the start of my career. O f course, that’s like the start of Timbaland movement,” he said to Idolator. – Angelin Yeoh