Actors in the caliber of Ving Rhames usually have two rates, a day rate and a weekly rate.
Meaning that If I as a filmmaker or a producer wanted to hire him for my movie I would contact his agent or manager and they would tell me his going rate.
Usually that rate will be inflated somewhat and you can negotiate down from that.
Ving Rhames is in the same category as Val Kilmer, Christian Slater, Ray Liotta etc. These actors still have name power, where a producer doing a movie in the $1M budget range can hire 3-4 of these names to appear in his movie and sell the movie based on those names.
Let's say I'm a producer and I want Ving Rhames for my movie for three days. His agent would likely give me his daily rate, and then I would negotiate down from that.
I know from advance roughly how much value his name would bring to my movie, and I know how much I can spend on his salary.
These actors can still command pretty high salaries, even though their name value isn't what it used to be.
This is the reason why they mostly play small parts in these movies. Producers can only hire them for one week or less.
When they work in studio pictures, that's a different story.
Low budget movies usually have a filming schedule of 14-20 days.
Big studio pictures can shoot for months.
Obviously if Ving Rhames plays a decent sized part in a studio picture, he would be spending weeks on set.
In that case his weekly salary would probably be a lot lower compared to his salary if he would be working for one week only in a low budget movie.
His overall salary would be more for a studio picture, but he would be spending a lot more of his time as well.
The reason why actors in this range still do studio pictures even if they will pay less for their time, is that it instantly boosts their career somewhat when they appear in a big movie, and studio pictures also sell more on DVD, television etc. And actors get residuals from all of that.
Whatever an actor gets paid to do a movie is always confidential information.
But I can tell you that as of right now actors like Kilmer, Slater, Liotta, Rhames etc. Get paid around $200k per week. Some a little less, some a little more.
It all depends on so many factors.
reply
share