Cheech and Chong’s First Movie Grossed $104 Million. But They Only Made $25K Apiece: ‘A Huge Horrible Deal’
https://people.com/cheech-and-chong-made-only-usd50k-after-their-first-film-grossed-usd104-million-11717952
Cheech and Chong’s First Movie Grossed $104 Million. But They Only Made $25K Apiece: ‘A Huge Horrible Deal’
https://people.com/cheech-and-chong-made-only-usd50k-after-their-first-film-grossed-usd104-million-11717952
6 comments
>”The movie comes out, and it’s a giant hit,” Chong says in the documentary. “Nobody thought Up in Smoke was going to do anything but [be] a bust. But the problem was, we had a hit movie and both Cheech and I were literally broke, cash poor.”
>Apparently, they ignored the cardinal rule of making money in Hollywood: Don’t quit your day job until you’re financially secure.
>”Our income depended on our live performances,” Chong continues. “And all the time we shot Up in Smoke, we stopped touring on the road. We had no income. We started looking very closely at the contract that we had signed with our lawyer. That was a huge horrible deal for us. The 90-10 split.
>After renegotiating, they each received $1 million in advance for their second film, 1980’s Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie.
Hey they don’t call it dope for nothing!🙃
Hollywood, man. You don’t get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate.
So they only got paid 25k for a year of work in the 70s? And that made their next job pay them a million.
As opposed to going to college, where you don’t get paid for four years, you actually have to pay. And the reward is hopefully a job that would pay 100k a year.
They are just bitching about their incredibly lucrative career.
Movie studios that have the budget to make movies, get the profits from the movies. That’s fair.
Cheech and Chong got paid in exposure. If they didn’t grow to hate each other they could have kept making a ton of money.
Were the others who were taking a huge financial risk supposed to not get paid??
That’s the way it works in the movie industry, the people laying out their time and money to make ‘the act’ famous take the first big cut to reward the risk they are taking.
Cheech and Chong and a hand held camera making a film and trying to market it and distribute it themselves would never have made a $104M movie on their own.
Were they high when they made that deal? Honest question.
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