10 Times Actors Actually Lost Money Filming Hit Movies

It may seem like there’s a ton of money to be made in the film industry, but that’s actually not the case. Not always, at least. In many instances, actors stick their necks out to do a movie they are very passionate about or are very inspired to produce, and they come away broke! Forget the multi-million dollar salaries, the huge box office totals, and the massive marketing budgets. Some movies just suck money out of the room. Even for the stars who sign on to do them, hoping it’ll propel their A-list profiles to even higher heights!

In this list, we’ll take a closer look at ten Hollywood movie stars who actually lost money producing hit movies seen by millions of people. From marketing costs stretching the budget thin to paltry low salaries after agreeing to get on set, these ten stories prove that the movie biz isn’t all sunshine and rainbows!

Related: Top 10 Tremendous Wastes Of Money

10 Dwayne Johnson

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was incredibly hopeful that moviegoers would love to see Black Adam (2022). The brains behind the DC Comics Extended Universe were hopeful that audiences would connect with the character, too. After all, the franchise was sputtering at the time, and they desperately needed to turn over a new leaf. So they signed Johnson on in large part because all of his movies have always been massive hits. Well, until this one! The superhero story about an Egyptian slave from 2600 BC who was granted great power by the ancient Gods simply failed to connect with audiences in the biggest and worst way.

For one, the film’s production was marred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, when it came time to release it, Johnson himself put his money where his mouth was and stepped up as both a producer and a promotional mouthpiece. Sadly, it didn’t work. Despite all of Johnson’s other films raking in dough, this one lost tons and tons of money for both him and Warner Brothers. According to reports, the film’s funders lost as much as $100 million after fans failed to show interest in the story and its off-shoot title character. Oops!^[1]

9 George Clooney

George Clooney believed so much in his 2008 sports comedy film Leatherheads (2008) that he invested a lot of his own money to make it work. But while the production got off without a hitch, and the film did live long enough to see theaters and be sold to moviegoers, the public mostly panned the flick. Sure, George may have written the film, starred in it, directed it, and even produced it by taking in the bigger picture with marketing and funding. However, he forgot the most important part: to make a movie the public wanted to see.

Ultimately, the film came to life on a budget of $58 million, which was put up by George’s own production company, Smokehouse Productions. Unfortunately for the ER alum and his Smokehouse brethren, they didn’t come anywhere close to making back their money. According to film industry watchdog reports, the film only brought in just a shade over $41 million in box office receipts. So it left George about $17 million in the hole. Ouch!^[2]

8 Kevin Costner

Kevin Costner isn’t afraid of investing his own money into his films. There’s just one problem with that strategy, though: When he misses, he misses REALLY big. Take The Postman (1997) as the perfect example of this. Costner himself helped fund the flick, but unfortunately, audiences didn’t go see it nearly enough to earn the star his money back. The film’s budget topped $80 million, according to reports, but it only turned around and brought in $17.6 million in ticket receipts. Worse yet, it didn’t even get an international release, preventing Costner from scoring big on foreign money after its disappointing American run.

But is Costner upset with losing so much money on the movie? Nope! Speaking to HuffPost about it after the film bombed, Kevin called The Postman a “really good movie.” Defending his decision to fund and produce it, he added: “If you revisit the movie, that’s a good thing to do. You can go back and revisit some movies that made well over $100 million and you might not care anything about them. And you can go back and maybe review a movie like that—you know, it was a pretty big, epic movie.” Hey, as long as he’s proud of it and okay with it losing so much money, who are we to criticize?^[3]

7 Brad Pitt

Brad Pitt felt so strongly about his 2007 movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford that he put up his own money to get it off the ground and out in theaters. The issue came when he found out how fans didn’t feel nearly as passionately about the movie. Pitt and his production team spent more than $30 million on the film—much of which came out of the A-list star’s own deep pockets. But the movie only returned about half of that total in gate receipts, making it a complete failure on every financial level.

Don’t count on Pitt regretting the process, though. “The way producers get us actors on is if it’s something we love and have to do, we do it for a price and get the movie made,” Pitt explained to Variety five years after the movie came out, in 2012. “It actually cost me money in the end. I paid to work on that one, and I think the film still lost money, but it was one of my favorites and one of the most rewarding to me.” Of course, there isn’t a price to be put on emotional satisfaction. Still, the thought of losing tens of millions of dollars is a tough pill to swallow!^[4]

6 John Travolta

John Travolta took a big risk when he decided to take Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s book Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 to the big screen. He had trouble nearly from the very beginning, too. Most notably, Travolta couldn’t find funding for the 2000 movie! So he had to fund it himself if he wanted to see it get made—and that’s exactly what he did.

The A-lister put in millions of his own dollars to fund the film and even agreed to forfeit the majority of his normal paycheck to make it. In turn, he hoped to see a major return on his investment with a popular showing at the box office. But he didn’t! Not even close. The film’s budget ended up soaring higher than $73 million in the end. And as for how much it brought in? Well, it didn’t even clear $30 million in returns. Ouch!

Still, even though he took a $43 million haircut, Travolta has no regrets about it. Speaking to the Daily Beast about losing so much money on Hubbard’s book-turned-film, Travolta argued: “Why would I ever regret that? I had the power to do whatever I wanted, and I chose to do a book that I thought was worthy of making into a movie. It’s a beautiful film. It’s a good movie.”^[5]

5 Sharon Stone

Sharon Stone had one of the most iconic film roles of all time with her work in Basic Instinct (1992). But it might surprise you to learn that she didn’t make any money on the film! Her co-star, Michael Douglas, may have commanded millions of dollars with his role in the flick, and he came away as a clear financial winner. But Sharon didn’t make that kind of money for her role, which catapulted her into true superstardom. Then, to make matters worse, she had to do the awards show run because the film was so successful—and so she lost money spending big on dresses, makeup, and stylists!

Between promoting the movie as it hit theaters and then doing the Oscars dance after it started to gain traction, Stone ended up bottoming out in the red. After looking back on her Basic Instinct experience in a chat years later with the CBC, Stone reminisced. “I didn’t get paid [well] to do Basic Instinct. I made a little bit of money. Michael made $14 million and has points. I made not enough money to buy my dress to go to the Oscars the next year. I was in this weird limbo where I was suddenly famous, but didn’t have any money.”^[6]

4 Jack Black

Jack Black thought so highly of Tenacious D that he used up all his willpower and goodwill with producers and Hollywood movers and shakers to bring it to the big screen in 2006. The result was the funny and bizarre movie Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny. While he may have loved that the film was even greenlit and produced at all, his adoration for his band didn’t translate into a financial windfall. In fact, it went completely in the other direction! Things got so bad that Black even had to forgo his usual $12 million per movie salary that he had been accustomed to drawing in other productions.

In the end, the movie was made on a $20 million budget. That’s not huge compared to the costs of some films nowadays. However, the issue was that Jack’s passion project only made back $13.9 million in theaters. So that’s quite a significant loss compared to what he and Tenacious D co-creator Kyle Gass had been hoping to get. Oh, yeah, and that’s the other thing: being partners on the musical side of things, Gass and Black had agreed to split their movie money evenly in the end. So each one ended up netting about $500,000 on a movie that cost $20 million of their own money and privately raised investor funds to make. Yikes!^[7]

3 Will Smith

Will Smith and his production company Overbrook Entertainment took a big chance in 2013 when they took the sci-fi flick After Earth to theaters. The film wasn’t cheap at all to make. In fact, they spent $150 million to produce the film—and then another $100 million to market it. Those numbers are massive in any context! And they are even more massive when you consider how much the film didn’t make! In the end, After Earth only brought back $234 million during its theatrical release. A big number out of context, obviously, but when you spend north of $250 million to get it out there, falling $17 million short doesn’t feel good. Smith himself later called it “the most painful failure in my career.”

“What I learned from that failure is how you win,” Smith told Esquire after the movie bombed so badly, and he took some time to reflect on its losses. “I got reinvigorated after the failure of ‘After Earth.’ I stopped working for a year and a half. I had to dive into why it was so important for me to have number-one movies. And I never would have looked at myself in that way.”

And he continued: “That Monday started the new phase of my life, a new concept: Only love is going to fill that hole. You can’t win enough, you can’t have enough money, you can’t succeed enough. There is not enough. The only thing that will ever satiate that existential thirst is love. And I just remember that day I made the shift from wanting to be a winner to wanting to have the most powerful, deep, and beautiful relationships I could possibly have.”^[8]

2 Patricia Arquette

Patricia Arquette was paid so little to be in Boyhood that the movie nearly wasn’t worth it to do. Financially, she came away with just a few thousand dollars for her trouble. Which, when you factor in time spent on set, time preparing and learning lines and blocking, and the costs of having assistants and helpers keep up her home and pets when she was gone to film, it just wasn’t worth it! Well, that is until she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Acctress for her role in it.

“It’s important to me as an actor to be able to make a living, but I’m going to tell you something,” Arquette revealed after the movie hit theaters and turned into a massive critical and award-show success. “I paid more money to my babysitter and my dog walker than I made on ‘Boyhood,’ and to be in Boyhood.” That seems kind of backward to us, considering popular movies make bank. But again, she won an Oscar for her role, so we have a feeling that she’s not too upset by the outcome.^[9]

1 Rebel Wilson

Rebel Wilson revealed in her memoir that the early career-defining role she had in Bridesmaids netted her just $3,500 in salary. That’s a remarkably small salary for a movie that turned out to be so popular and well-known. Not only that, but Rebel actually had to wait more than a year before the check cleared and was sent to her! We hope she wasn’t counting on paying rent or anything with the proceeds. She did use the money to join the Screen Actors Guild, at least, so that’s a nice move to make. But she ended up in the red on it overall because she had to dish out dollars for dresses and beauty bills when it came time to premiere and promote the film!

“I basically made no money,” Rebel wrote about the financial reality behind Bridesmaids in her memoir. “I lost money because I had to pay to go to the premiere, like to buy my dress and everything. That was a really skint year where I was living on $60 a week in L.A. once I’d paid my rent and my car hire. I wasn’t partying or living this [movie star] life. It was basically having that focus, trying to write for myself, like going to auditions.”^[10]