How Much Everyone Working On a $200 Million Movie Earns | Vanity Fair

Find out the budget breakdown of a hypothetical Hollywood blockbuster.

In using the budgets of actual +200MM blockbuster movies as references, this video excludes non-human costs, and reflects an approximation of the take home pay of all humans involved, based on average union rates.

Disclaimer: Please note not every budget breakdown is the same, and some roles are subject to wider fluctuations than others. This is here to serve as approximations based on a hypothetical film which has never been made.



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How Much Everyone Working On a $200 Million Movie Earns | Vanity Fair

[ThePhils]

I can't believe I sat all the way through for no after credit scene

[FrogyProd]

Never thought I'd consider a career in being a cat

[platothepug]

Supporting Actor #5 needs a better agent.

[tempderp]

It's weird to me that the actors get paid 10x more than the directors and higher ups. VFX probably do the most grueling work...

[kewkabe]

I worked in visual effects for a major Hollywood effects company and none of the effects figures are accurate. They seem to just be taking the number of people in credited roles and the "average annual salary" for that position and assuming everyone works full-time for a year on the project. Which isn't true. Then "Dialect coach" $50, 000 again is based on some kind of average annual thing, but in reality a dialect coach will spend only a day or two with the actor and maybe be on set once. That would be about $1, 500, not $50K.

[FilmmakerIQ]

Can you link your sources for these numbers? Some figures seem suspiciously high like the Editor at $924, 500 - that's like $31K for 30 weeks - the union minimum is $2, 105. I understand you wouldn't be paying minimum but there seems to be a large gap.

I was able to find the budget for Roger Deakins on The Villiage - only a $70million movie, but he got paid $384, 000, not nearly $900, 000 that this breakdown up has budgeted.

I have a hard time fathoming a 2nd Unit Director getting paid a cool million - that's a quarter of the director's salary for a lot less than a quarter of the work (obviously depending on the production).

On the flip side, I suspect you might have under stated the amount of money spent on VFX. A $200M movie would hire multiple VFX houses, so take your VFX staff and triple or quadruple it.

[InsaneGamersOfficial]

The MPAA number shown at the end correlates to Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, incase anybody is interested.

[ThibautBreton]

The VFX salaries are realistic for the artists being paid 20k/year, but the ones earning 600k+, that is really crazy, never heard of that kind of salary in my industry. Even the compositor's salary of 50k+ on average seems overestimated, most of the salaries you displayed here have nothing in common with the reality, which is low wages, lot of hours / week, very often uncredited... Please don't display those kind of unrealistic numbers, that's really disrespectful for all the artists in the world fighting bad conditions of work.

[OriginalJetForMe]

Any chance you'd consider making a website with this same credits list, but make it a bit more interactive, so that if you click on a role, you get a callout with information about a) what the role is, and b) how long they worked to earn that payment (and anything else that's relevant)? You could even do different credits lists for different classes of movie. Thanks!

[whatwan]

"doctor who delivers bad news" very cheeky

[danny]

first time enjoy reading a roll credit

[Toini]

Guys keep in mind this is the billing for a service. So when it says animator 900k or whatever, it means that the studio was billed 900k for the animator's services. In these costs are included a % for softwares, storage costs, computing power, small margin for the company, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if, out of those salaries, less than 30% went to the actual animator.

[jaredkrichevsky]

By concept artist you mean - 50 concept artists that each get a small piece of that pie and no credit

[eMPaNaH]

animators 900k? modelers 800k? more like 50k and 40k...

[davidjtate]

One thing I would add to this credits list is that there are many VFX artists that work on a movie that don't even get a credit on screen. I know it's happened to me several times.

[ericpetey]

Vanity fair needs to fire their research dept...the vfx numbers are mostly wildly inaccurate... ridiculously so.

[bioglassmusic]

downvoted for serious lack of realism. Apart from actors and producers cut everyone else in half then take what you don't see and add that to advertising.

[RoaringJaguar]

Wow this was an absolutely amazing breakdown - thank you SOOO much for making this!

[thiarmine]

wow this was a fantastic way to visualize the numbers

[herdisbak]

I finally sat through this. 28 years I have been avoiding credits.