Per Vanity Fair, all is not as well in Tinseltown as the box-office cheer-leading would have you believe. Either way, some folks are raking it in. Especially those Harry Potter kids. Wow.
Despite setting a domestic box-office record of $10.6 billion in 2009, Hollywood is on edge. The oceans of easy, eager money that once flooded the industry from foreign investors, hedge funds, and private-equity pools have all but dried up. And with actual attendance still off sharply from its 2002 high and DVD revenues in retreat, fewer and fewer movies are getting made. Worse still, from a talent point of view, where once studios were happy to reward stars with lavish back-end deals siphoning money straight from the studio’s share of the box-office gross, they are now reining in such deals, forcing many stars to collect only when all of the film’s costs have been recouped. In Hollywood, then, as in most of the country, people just aren’t getting paid what they used to. But for a select group the money is still rolling in.
First, a definition: this list of Hollywood elite is limited to creative figures–producers, directors, stars–in film. (We include no moguls, agents, or people who work primarily in television.) Calculating their earning power is an inexact science, but we interviewed scores of people with access to actual numbers and deal terms: agents, lawyers, studio executives, and, occasionally, the stars themselves. Worldwide box-office figures were taken from Box Office Mojo and Box Office Guru. Revenue numbers for DVDs–for the first three quarters of 2009–were supplied by Adams Media Research; we came up with our own revenue estimates for DVDs released in the fourth quarter by applying a conservative multiplier to a movie’s domestic box-office. …
1 Michael Bay
Estimated 2009 earnings: $125 million
2 Steven Spielberg
Estimated 2009 earnings: $85 million
3 Roland Emmerich
Estimated 2009 earnings: $70 million
4 James Cameron
Estimated 2009 earnings: $50 million
5 Todd Phillips
Estimated 2009 earnings: $44 million
6 Daniel Radcliffe
Estimated 2009 earnings: $41 million
7 Ben Stiller
Estimated 2009 earnings: $40 million
8 Tom Hanks
Estimated 2009 earnings: $36 million
9 J. J. Abrams
Estimated 2009 earnings: $36 million
10 Jerry Bruckheimer
Estimated 2009 earnings: $35.5 million
Full list and a lot more detail here.