Margot Robbie is definitely making big bucks with Barbie. The actress who also happened to co-produce the film, is expected to earn $50 million as part of a deal that combines her salary and back-end box office bonuses.
Citing a number of sources, Variety revealed the news, and her Tom Ackerley is also a producer on the film. So far the movie has moved beyond $1 billion at the worldwide box office, making Greta Gerwig the highest-grossing female director of a live-action movie at the global box office, and it topped 2019’s Captain Marvel, which was co-directed by Anna Boden.
The 33-year-old star of Barbie, produced the film with her company LuckyChap Entertainment, which previously produced Birds of Prey and the Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman.
Initially, Robbie had thought it would be best for Gal Gadot to be the one to play Barbie before Gerwig convinced her to take the part. She hand-picked Gerwig to direct and co-write the project with Gerwig’s real-life partner Noah Baumbach.
Telling Vogue in May, Robbie revealed that it’s not that she wanted to play Barbie, or dreamt of being Barbie, or anything like that. “This is going to sound stupid, but I really didn’t even think about playing Barbie until years into developing the project,”
Before Barbie achieved its box-office milestone, which the film clinched just over two weeks after its release, Robbie told Collider that she pitched Barbie as a film that could make $1 billion.
She also mentioned that she thinks her pitch in the green-light meeting was the studios have prospered so much when they’re brave enough to pair a big idea with a visionary director. She went on to give an example that while “naming anything that’s been incredible and made a ton of money for the studios over the years” was “dinosaurs and [Steven] Spielberg,” aka 1993’s Jurassic Park, which launched a movie franchise.
“And I was like, ‘And now you’ve got Barbie and Greta Gerwig.’ And I think I told them that it’d make a billion dollars, which maybe I was overselling, but we had a movie to make, okay?” she joked in the interview, before the film ended up making good on that promise.
Main Image: Daily Mail
