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Movie stars get paid a lot of money. If that isn’t a precise enough statement for you, let me put a number on it. $50million. That’s how much Dwayne Johnson was reportedly paid for the 2024 Christmas movie Red One. It failed to make back its $200m budget at the box office and landed at number ten on the list of most-streamed movies of the year. If those stats and the reviews are anything to go by, that paycheque was not worth it.
Even stars known for their acting chops are capable of doing terrible projects just to pad out their bank accounts. Robert De Niro, the man who made both Taxi Driver and Dirty Grandpa, is at the very pinnacle of this category, but turns out that we might be able to add Kurt Russell to the list as well.
For someone who got his start in Disney movies as a teen, it’s remarkable just how fully Russell has been able to shed his wholesome persona. Thanks to his affiliation with John Carpenter in movies like Escape from New York and The Thing, he is more associated with gritty anti-heroes than the Mickey Mouse Club. After a string of successes in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, including Tango & Cash, Backdraft, and Tombstone, Russell was a top box office draw, and he was in a position to ask for a payday to match.
In 1996, he negotiated his biggest salary yet for Paul W S Anderson’s Soldier. Released in 1998, the film was styled as a Blade Runner sequel but was so poorly received that even that distinction hasn’t been enough to give it a cult following. Russell starred as Sergeant Todd 3465, a soldier who was trained from birth to be a ruthless, emotionless killing machine.
He earned $15m for the film, which, even by the standards of the ‘90s, wasn’t unprecedented. Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks had already pocketed about $70m each for their respective roles in Mission: Impossible and Saving Private Ryan, though most of those paycheques involved box office bonuses rather than baseline salary.
What set Russell’s role apart was how little he spoke. Throughout Soldier’s 99-minute runtime, he utters a grand total of 104 words. That doesn’t mean that he got paid $15m for almost no work. He’s on screen in nearly every scene and had to perform some pretty breathtaking stunts. He even broke his ankle during production.
Unlike some actors who take home a massive salary for very little effort (again, De Niro, we’re talking specifically about you), Russell put the blood, sweat, and tears behind it. In fact, being the star of a movie and only being able to speak for a fraction of the time you’re on screen is a serious challenge. Actors who do this arguably deserve more money than those who get to spout Tarantino-esque monologues.
Sadly, Soldier was not received well, which made Russell’s take-home pay look pretty exorbitant. Off a hefty budget of $60m, it only managed to make back $14.5m at the box office before quickly fading into obscurity. Russell’s performance, it should be noted, is blameless for the movie’s fate.
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