Question about actor's royalty fees

Always intrigued me. Nowadays any TV show/film is repeated thousands of times on satellite/cable. So do the actors get money every time they're shown? Will Star Wars put the 3rd stormtrooper on the right's children through college? Or do you have to have a speaking part? Or is it just the regular/recurring characters? And how much do they get? Anyone know?

 

Songwriters receive royalties, the kind of payments you're referring to are called residuals which I'll get to shortly.

Well, first of all you have to divide between superstars, stars, workaday actors and extras.
They all have different levels of pay obviously based on their status and value to the production.

No, the third stormtrooper on the right isn't going to get residuals to put his kid through college. He's probably going to make about $100 to $ 150 a day.

Tom Cruise is a superstar. He can receive a percentage of the gross (usually 20%) of the box office from the first day it shows in theatres, in addition to the twenty million dollar paycheck he got just from agreeing to be in the film. That's all based on the economic power of his ability to put butts in seats. Even if he's become kind of controversial and disliked, he is still popular enough to get people to buy a ticket.

James Earl Jones, while a very popular actor and quite well known, is not a superstar because his name is not big enough to get a 100 million dollar movie financed, though it might be enough to get a 5 to 10 million dollar indie feature financed.

I read one time that he was paid $ 900,000 for appearing in Coming to America with Eddie Murphy.

The vast majority of actors fall below the two earlier categories, just working actors who make union scale, which are the required minimums for a day of work. There's a daily rate and a weekly rate, based on the budget of the film. The bigger the budget the higher the day rate. The Screen Actors Guild regulates all of this.

Residuals are based on a complex formula, but I do know that actors receive more residuals than they used to, for a longer period of time, but it doesn't go on forever.

When I was an agent one of my actors had a small part in a commercial for Meineke mufflers. It was a Screen Actors Guild commercial. He got paid about $ 2000 for the actual two days of filming. The commercial ran nationally on cable channels and network TV all over the country and it was also shown on local TV stations.

It ran for 21 months and over that time period he received dozens of residual checks that totaled about $ 28,000 IIRC.

On a low budget indie film done under a SAG contract, the day rate for an actor is $ 504 a day.

On really low budget movies the pay is about $ 264 a day or $ 933 a week, again under SAG.

 

Cool, thanks, you obviously know your stuff. I remember Matt Le Blanc from Friends talking about doing one ketchup commercial that ran for 2 years and put him through college. At the same time David Soul has always said he never got a penny for all the repeats of Starsky and Hutch and for the money it would cost him in legal fees it wasn't worth him trying

 

Yeah, back in the 60s and 70s the SAG TV contracts were not very generous in paying actors residuals. I remember once reading that the actors on Lost in Space got residual fees for the first 2 times an episode was re-run on national TV and after that, nothing.

The Star Trek actors in the original series had pretty much the same deal, so when all those syndicated episodes were running they were out of luck. Paramount made a fortune off all that syndication money, but under the contracts with the actors, they got squat.

The smart thing to do now if you're an actor on a successful TV show is negotiate a huge salary per episode and also demand a portion of the syndication income. Jerry Seinfeld will be a rich man forever because he did that.

I remember reading once that Carroll O'Connor at the height of the success of All in the Family in which he was the lead character in the 70s was earning $ 210,000 per episode. Nowadays, that's chicken feed, but then it was pretty good money, especially since they did 36 episodes per season.

James Garner had trouble too.



In July 1983, Garner filed suit against Universal Studios for $16.5 million in connection with his on-going dispute from The Rockford Files TV show. The suit charged Universal with "breach of contract; failure to deal in good faith and fairly; and fraud and deceit. It was eventually settled out of court in 1989. As part of the agreement Garner could not disclose the amount of the settlement.[4][16]

Garner sued Universal again in 1998 for $2.2 million over syndication royalties. In this suit he charged the studio with "deceiving him and suppressing info about syndication". He was supposed to receive $25,000 per episode that ran in syndication, but Universal charged him "distribution fees". He also felt that the studio did not bid the show out to the highest bidder for the episode reruns.