The Biggest Flops of Hollywood's Highest-Paid Actors

Each year, Dorothy Pomerantz and the celebrity-loving number crunchers at Forbescalculate the paydays of Tinseltown’s biggest names to reveal Hollywood’s Highest-Paid Actors. Yesterday they did it once again, announcing a list of names that includes the usual suspects (Leonardo DiCaprio and Adam Sandler), some surprising newcomers (Channing Tatum and Liam Neeson), and a couple of notable omissions (Johnny Depp and Will Smith, for starters. Let’s just blame After Earth for everything).

The former Highest-Paid staples who have dropped off the list should, of course, be the least surprising part of it all. After all, we are talking about the entertainment business—an industry where a split second separates fame from infamy (hello, Paula Deen). Yet, as Robert Downey Jr.’s position at the top of this year's pile proves, Hollywood’s also a place that loves a good comeback story (cue the Jerry Goldsmith score).

As Big Willie learned the hard way this year, even a standard $20 million paycheck can’t make an actor immune to dropping a box office bomb or two along the way. It’s a lesson every member of this year’s Highest-Paid club knows all too well. These are The Biggest Flops of Hollywood’s Highest-Paid Actors.

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Annual earnings: $32 million
Biggest flop: The Other Man (2008)

Liam Neeson’s reinvention as a middle-aged action star is a relatively new phenomenon, so his tendency toward small, character-driven films is understandable. But signing on the dotted line for this transatlantic tale of adultery—which DVDTalk.com’s Brian Orndorf described as “strangely inhospitable, perhaps better appreciated three margaritas into a Sunday afternoon Lifetime film festival than a critical Friday night rental”—is indeed the real mystery. Domestically, the film earned back less than one percent of its original $15 million budget.

Annual earnings: $33 million
Biggest flop: Heart Condition (1990)

Denzel Washington is one of the few A-list actors who doesn’t have a lot of cinematic skeletons in his closet. The two-time Oscar winner has kept his filmography relatively classy from the beginning, with Norman Jewison, Sidney Lumet, and Richard Attenborough among his earliest directors. Yet, the same year he won his first Oscar, for Edward Zwick’s Glory, Washington starred in this bizarre comedy in which “a racist cop receives a heart transplant from a black lawyer he hates, who returns as a ghost to ask the cop to help take down the men who murdered him.” Washington later claimed that he was talked into making the film by his agent, whom he promptly fired.

Annual earnings: $35 million
Biggest flop: Rock of Ages (2012)

Note to producers: Just because a piece of theater plays well on the stage does not mean it can translate to the screen. For proof, look no further than the embarrassingly uneven Rock of Ages, which somehow managed to seduce Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Paul Giamatti, and Catherine Zeta-Jones to sign up for a project that was a dud from the start.

If Mark Wahlberg’s role in Rock Star (see No. 4) taught us anything, it’s that audiences don’t want to see their favorite celebrities decked out in Bret Michaels’ hand-me-downs. (They don't really want them to be Scientologists either, but that's a different story.)

Annual earnings: $37 million
Biggest flop: Airheads (1994)

If you’ve ever wondered what sort of deal with the devil Steve Buscemi made in order to appear in pretty much every Adam Sandler movie ever, the answer is simple: Airheads, a so-called “comedy” about a bumbling band who hijack a radio station in order to get their latest song some air time. The plan does not go smoothly. Unless that plan was to make a forgettable film which has Sandler shouting lines like, “I’m gonna stab your heads off… with my dick!” to absolutely no audience laughter.

Annual earnings: $39 million
Biggest flop: Total Eclipse (1995)

Two years before he was boarding Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio was playing poet Arthur Rimbaud in Agnieszka Holland’s Total Eclipse, about the French teen’s tempestuous relationship with his mentor/lover Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis). Audiences didn’t seem to care; the film took in just north of $330,000 at the box office. But it did see a slight uptick in video sales two years later, once DiCaprio had cemented his heartthrob status as Jack Dawson and his legion of female fans learned that Leo went full-frontal for this film.

Annual earnings: $46 million
Biggest flop: Southland Tales (2006)

How jealous must Hulk Hogan be of The Rock? After all, it was The Hulkster, a.k.a. Hollywood Hulk, who first attempted to make the crossover from professional wrestler to family-friendly film star back in the early 1990s with movies like Suburban Commando and Mr. Nanny. The Rock just did it better, raking in more than $1 billion at the box office so far this year.

But not everything The Rock pummels turns to gold. Case in point: Southland Tales, Richard Kelly’s futuristic follow-up to Donnie Darko, where a handful of Los Angeles residents prepare for the end of the world as they know it. The film’s disappointing box office performance (it earned back just two percent of its $17 million budget) wasn’t all that surprising, as the film underwent a number of edits following a disastrous debut at Cannes.

Annual earnings: $52 million
Biggest flop: Rock Star (2001)

The actor/underwear model/rapper formerly known as Marky Mark’s placement near the top of Forbes’ list may seem surprising. But when you consider his prolificacy as a producer—particularly in television, where he’s brought Entourage and Boardwalk Empire to HBO—his annual income makes more sense. Wahlberg’s career in front of the camera, however, has been a bit of a roller coaster ride, one in which he follows up mindless big-budget bombs like The Happening with highly-acclaimed indies like The Fighter.

But not even the double star power of Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston could save Rock Star, the 2001 comedy-drama that sees the lowly singer of a rock 'n' roll tribute band hired as the lead singer of the group he worships. It was as funny as This Is Spinal Tap, only unintentionally so.

Annual earnings: $55 million
Biggest flop: The Fountain (2006)

Had Darren Aronofsky chosen to add a few song-and-dance numbers to his indie sci-fi film, which traces an epic love story over a thousand years, things might have been different. And while The Fountain has its fair share of rabid fans, its detractors—including several critics who booed the film when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival—have won the numbers game. Shot on a budget of $35 million, the film racked up just $15,461,638 in box office receipts.

Annual earnings: $60 million
Biggest flop: White House Down (2013)

Hollywood doesn’t seem to know what to make out of Channing Tatum. Since making his feature debut opposite Samuel L. Jackson in 2005’s Coach Carter, he has worked steadily—releasing as many as five films a year, many of them in roles that required him to shut up, take off his shirt, and look pretty. He obliged, but proved that he had a lot to offer in the way of range in Steven Soderbergh’s smart Haywire and Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s surprisingly funny 21 Jump Street.

Tatum’s placement on Forbes’ list is largely due to his role as star and producer of the largely autobiographical Magic Mike, which Tatum and Soderbergh financed themselves (and subsequently reaped the rewards of its surprising box office success).

Like many young actors who suddenly have an entire world of possibilities open to them, Tatum made a slight miscalculation with this summer’s White House Down, which can best be described as Die Hard Goes to Washington. The $150 million actioner has so far made little more than half its budget back at the global box office.

Annual earnings: $75 million
Biggest flop: Friends & Lovers (1999)

Twenty years ago, Robert Downey Jr. was one of Hollywood's most in-demand actors, and a first-time Oscar nominee for his role in Chaplin. A decade later, he was better known for his multiple drug and alcohol-related arrests and failed attempts at rehab. Though he continued acting throughout these troubled times, he wasn't the first choice on any studio executive's list of leading men. Which would explain why he’d agree to take a role in Friends & Lovers—and give Stephen Baldwin top billing!

(Barely) released in 1999, Friends & Lovers is a poorly made romantic-drama about a group of friends who spend a weekend skiing, talking, and talking some more in Park City, Utah. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert stated that: “I don't want to review Friends & Lovers, I want to flunk it. This movie is not merely bad, but incompetent. I get tapes in the mail from 10th graders that are better made than this.”

Audiences clearly weren’t interested either. The film's total box office take? $33,543—about .06 percent of what Downey cleared just on a supporting role in The Avengers. Talk about full circle!