Hollywood Squeezes Stars' Pay In Slump

Wall Street Journal:

Hollywood, needing to cut costs in lean times, is starting to say no to its stars.

For years, the biggest movie stars often landed deals paying them a percentage -- sometimes as much as 20% -- of a studio's take of box-office revenues from the first dollar the movie makes, even if it turned out to be a flop that cost the studio millions. As a result, the biggest celebrities broke the $20 million mark. Eddie Murphy got a big payday for the flop "Meet Dave," which cost Twentieth Century Fox about $70 million and took in only $11.8 million at the domestic box office.

Read the whole story: Wall Street Journal