Downey Jr.s Cut Dwarfs Other Avengers' Take

Robert Downey Jr.’s payout from Marvel Studios’ smash hit The Avengers could reach upwards of $50 million, a level of compensation that is certainly not out of line by Hollywood blockbuster standards, but which totally dwarfs the amounts earned by Downey Jr.’s fellow Avengers. According to inside sources quoted by The Hollywood Reporter, Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Mark Ruffalo (Hulk), Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye), and Chris Evans (Captain America) should end up making $2-3 million with bonuses, while Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson could take in roughly twice that amount.

While six million is a pretty good payday, it’s eight times less Marvel Moolah than the amount the actor playing Tony Stark will bring home. According THR after Iron Man earned $585 million worldwide in 2008, Downey Jr.’s agent negotiated a deal that gave the actor a 5-7% slice of Marvel’s take on future films featuring Iron Man.

Big payouts for charismatic stars in major franchises are hardly unknown in Hollywood. Johnny Depp has earned in excess of $250 million for the four Pirates of the Caribbean films in which he starred. What is interesting about The Avengers situation is the fact that it is the notoriously frugal Marvel that is making the payouts.

While Marvel did what it had to do to lock down Downey, Jr. the studio sent a major message when it replaced actor Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle as Jim Rhodes (War Machine) in Iron Man 2 and kept the compensation for key supporting roles like those played by ScarJo and Mickey Rourke in Iron Man 2 at the very low end of the Hollywood talent pay scale.
Marvel Studios’ frugality makes sense not just for the studio’s bottom line, but also in view of the kind of films that Marvel wants to make. Performers’ salaries could become a major stumbling block for superhero team-up movies. As constituted for the movie, The Avengers team includes seven major performers. If they all received compensation at the level of Downey Jr., the movie would have to earn an Avatar-like $2.2 billion just to break even.

As the lead actor in Marvel Studios’ break-out film Iron Man, Downey Jr. was able to strike a very good deal for himself—and considering the fact that director Michael Bay took home $80 million for helming the first Transformers movie, the $50 million for Downey Jr. looks like a pretty good deal for Marvel too, especially since most of that money results from the fact that the movie was an absolute worldwide smash and wouldn’t have been paid out at all if the film had been an abject failure like The Green Lantern.

Whedon's Hulk is Different

One interesting change to The Avengers lineup is the way in which director Joss Whedon has treated the character of Bruce Banner/The Hulk. There was little or no physical resemblance between the most famous Banner/Hulk combination, Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, who played the bifurcated character in the popular long-running Hulk television series. Even in the modern Hulk movies Eric Bana and Edward Norton morphed into to giant CGI characters with few physically characteristics tying them to the actors playing Banner, but Whedon has kept his Hulk reasonably-sized with a heavy resemblance to actor Mark Ruffalo.


Mark RuffaloFor The Avengers Whedon not only secured the services of a top flight actor to play Bruce Banner in Mark Ruffalo, he was determined to make his Hulk look and move like a greatly expanded version of Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, though Whedon also made sure that his Hulk was never more than 8 and half-feet tall. One of the most recent stills released by Marvel Studios indicates that Whedon has definitely succeeded in making his Hulk resemble Ruffalo.

Whedon used motion-capture technology with Ruffalo to make sure that his Hulk and Bruce Banner moved in the same way, and he decided to make the characters resemble each other as much as possible as Whedon told Comic Book Movie: “Very early on we decided to build the Hulk's face off of Mark's, not just in terms of what he was going to do movement-wise in playing the character, but also the actual physicality of it, including the bone structure and contours of the eyes and mouth. We really wanted to bridge the gap between the characters so that when he turns into the Hulk, you go, 'Oh my God, that's Bruce Banner! Only he is big and green and very angry!”

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