By: Russ Burlingame on August 7, 2012
Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games series from Lionsgate, will become one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood with a $10 million paycheck for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, according to Yahoo! Movies.
It’s still not enough to catapult the young performer to the top of the heap, though; it’s about half what Kristen Stewart made for the last couple of Twilight movies. Even she’s hard to call overpaid by Hollywood standards, though; not only is Twilight one of the top-grossing series of all time, but Stewart’s paycheck accounts for less than 2% of the film’s total income, as opposed to comedy superstar Eddie Murphy, who Yahoo says earns more than $1 out of every $3 his movies take in.
They also point out that the increasing grosses on sequels and the increased demand for these actors tends to drive salaries sharply up; Daniel Radcliffe, who made less than $1 million for the first Harry Potter film, was earning more than $30 million per picture by the end of the franchise. There aren’t nearly as many Hunger Games as there are Harry Potter books, of course, but the studio has decided to split the third film–Mockingjay–into two films, meaning that it’s likely Lawrence will make at least $30 million combined for those.
