Actor adept at playing exceedingly rich men, Robert Downey Jr, has today been announced as the lead role in the sequel to last year’s Forbes‘ Top Earning Actor list, nailing his audition with an estimated income of $75 million USD in the year from June 2013 – the same amount he earned the year before and coincidentally the same amount you earned when asked hypothetically how much money is too much money for you to make in a year.
Forbes are attributing Downey’s material value to his being an indispensable caboose on Disney’s Marvel gravy train, which to this point has generated some $4 billion in revenue at the box office, not including ancillary income generators like home entertainment and ridiculous Tony Stark merchandise.
Furthermore, Downey Jr. generated his fair share of press when he held out on signing his contract for upcoming Marvel cash cow, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, until he had secured “more money than ever upfront for the film” to deposit in his – excuse the pollination of pop cultural references – Iron Bank.
To generate the list, which also includes aspiring superhero of Herculean bank and bulk, The Rock, Forbes exchange hushed words with agents, producers, lawyers and other clandestine industry types to deduce how much each actor generates only from their ostensible primary source of income – the talkies.
They don’t account for taxes, fees incurred by agents or “the costs of being a celebrity,” whatever they are [see below].
The full list reads as follows.
1. Robert Downey Jr. – $75 million
2. Dwayne Johnson – $52 million
3. Bradley Cooper – $46 million
4. Leonardo DiCaprio – $39 million
5. Chris Hemsworth – $37 million
6. Liam Neeson – $36 million
7. Ben Affleck – $35 million
8. Christian Bale – $35 million
9. Will Smith – $32 million
10. Mark Wahlberg – $32 million
Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images for PCA
