Tim Miller says he spent two years making “Deadpool” and earned $225,000.
Forget the salary. The more egregious sin is not getting a cut of Disney merchandise!
“I feel like every time I walk down the aisles out there on the floor of CCXP and I see all these Deadpool figurines, I think they wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t made that film. And I feel uniquely fortunate that I could be part of it. Then, then my second thought is, I wish my director deals had a piece of the merchandising so that I could get some money from all of that.”
I’d be surprised if Disney gave points on anything to anyone these days.
Unregulated capitalism always ends with a few big corps, and once that happens they have all the labor negotiating power.
If the few big studios try to compete they’ll lose potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. If they all “individually’” decide to cut pay for highly specialized positions, that labor pool doesn’t really have any other options but to take it.
People always forget “the free market will do what’s best” means making the product that profits the most, that often includes cheaping out as much as possible on everything including labor, and selling as much as possible. That’s rarely the same as making the best product.
Disney and Marvel should have never been allowed to merge.
“Disney and Marvel should have never been allowed to merge.”
I actually feel nauseous when I think about the fact that everything has degraded so much that this is even a sentence that actually had to be stated out loud as if it was a contentious idea that must be arrived at rather than a truth so obvious that everyone feels the same rage in their bones and words are hardly necessary to understand why.
Fox and Disney merger shouldn’t have happened.
When Disney bought marvel they weren’t doing so hot. They’d already sold off media rights for major franchises (Spiderman, xmen, fantastic four), and had taken a huge gamble with Ironman. While it panned out Disney came in well before anything was proven regarding the mcu - https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/how-marvel-went-from-bankruptcy-to-billions/
George Lucas got a % of merchandise from Star Wars and Disney lost out on a crap ton of money because of it. I doubt they will make that decision again.
20th Century Fox was the distributor for Star Wars. They didn’t own any of it until 2012 to my knowledge.
True. I meant the OG distributor. George Lucas took a cut in order to get a % of the toys.
Smart dude
Surely, the DGA is at fault here. That is just absurd. That’s basically what I (a set lighting technician…not even the DP or the gaffer) made over a two year stretch (when the film industry was still alive and hadn’t been absolutely decimated by Disney and Netflix’s monopolies).
Shawn Levy was behind the camera for this year’s “Deadpool & Wolverine,” Reynolds’ first outing in Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Shawn Levy is a DP? Wow! If you want to embarrass yourself, conflate cinematography with directing.
Seriously, what role are they talking about? How is it union etc…
Director. What I take from it is that directors have to do YEARS of development on a project that might never even get greenlit. So, when they finally do get to the shoot day, they can finally be paid the full DGA director’s rate. But until they are on set, they basically work for free and have a gigantic team of people that work for them to help them secure the gig.
This is what I had came to conclude about the real life prospect of being a DP. But this revelation isn’t unique recently. I heard the same thing in a podcast with a director. If true, this paints a damning picture of the film industry that even I (a union filmmaker) hadn’t fully come to understand.
maybe he got free mint mobile service for a year, too
No, it’s was a $15/mo deal (for three months, prepaid up front, then $45/mo afterward).
Is this really how the mint mobile deal is? That doesn’t seem like much of a deal at all.
No, you can keep it at $15/month if you pay for an entire year upfront.
The bigger problem is upgrading your phone. They never gave pixel. Which for me was the breaking point. I had them for several years and liked the service. But the pixel phone is awesome.
Bruh that’s a lot of money though.
It’s 9375 per month. That’s quite a bit over double my salary.
It’s not an outrageous salary but it’s still a really good salary.
My buddy works standard 8 hour days for amazon, albeit on a shifted schedule 11-7, and makes 450k a year.
I bet he doesn’t work as hard as the director did.
It’s an alright salary, but for someone who made the company that much, some additional incentives are more than justified.
It is only “really good” at 40hr/week. It’s only around $52/hr…if he was working more hours it gets worse.
Its more than that per month. Above (I think) $160k, you don’t pay FICA (Social Security) anymore for the year, so more of that goes in your pocket. The reason is that the Social Security benefit you receive later never goes above a certain amount.Edit: I missed the “2 year” part and my original statement was for 1 year.
$225k/24 months is exactly $9375/month, and may or may not have exceeded the FICA tax limit at the time, depending on how he was paid. If it was paid out biweekly like a normal paycheck, it wouldn’t have gotten close, but if it was a lump sum when he finished, it definitely would have.
Paying two years of work as a lump sum at the end is a pretty terrible thing to do to employees, so I hope they didn’t. There may be other options, I’m not familiar with the norms in filmmaking.
They don’t have a good reputation, for starters
I mean, that’s still a lot of money, and to my understanding the original Deadpool was made on a shoestring budget that was continuously hacked away at by Fox. Like shoestring enough that Ryan Reynolds had to step in and use some his own money to keep the film going at points, it was that dire. I don’t really know if I’m going to give Tim that much of a pity party on this, especially when everybody who worked on Deadpool credits Ryan Reynolds as the reason for its existence.
Musk made that much in a day since 2022.
That sounds about right. Maybe a bit low considering the profit made
That’s plenty of money
How??? He directed a movie for the biggest box office franchise in cinema history - a movie that went on to earn $782 million in the box office alone.
He earned $225,000 in two years of directing. That’s nothing.
What do you do for work? Because I think I need a career change.
I’m not just being snarky, but 6 figures USD would change my life.
Why is everyone in this thread comparing themselves to a popular ~60 year old director working in Hollywood?
Yes, it’s a good salary compared to the average person, but he’s not working an average job. He should be earning at least 5x more like his colleagues are.
This was his first movie. He wasn’t a big director. Also, he runs one of the big CGI/VFX studios, Blur, so if they were doing well he was making more than just his Deadpool salary.
Your second point is completely irrelevant. Many people have side-hustles. But that has nothing to do with what he was paid for: this movie.
He should be earning at least 5x more like his colleagues are.
Do you think it’s fair that any person ever makes 5x more than anyone else?
Did he spend a decade uni with a PhD 🤨. I doubt it and I doubt his skills are any more exceptional than most.
Going rate for a first class SWE In most first world countries is ~30k USD. It’s an absolutely amazing salary.
I don’t know about the US, maybe the QOL there is much better than the media portrays, but I think that’s more than enough money.
112,500 a year is plenty of money.
Not when your primary work is irregular and you basically have to live and breath the work for the many months you are attached to it. Basically every waking hour you are on the clock, which makes the hourly rate pretty low.
Isn’t that every salaried position though? Last year I was on 30k USD for 7 days a week all day. Always on call.
That’s pretty common in my area for people with postgraduate in STEM.
In most salary roles you would be tenured with job security, and you would be covered by an appropriate award that limits the hours you work in a week.
In film production you get a job for a few months, and during those months you stay in a hotel or sleeper trailer, don’t get to see your family, and work from wake to sleep.
You would work potentially 18 hours, go back to your room to prep for the next day, then get what little sleep you can before doing it again. For months.
Then after all that you have no guarantee when your next job will be. Some industry professionals go years between jobs. It’s an extremely intense workload.
Oh that’s interesting.
In my region salary comes with no protections, we have no fault termination. So quite often contractors are salaried for the three months they’re on then cut.
You’ll find a job and you might be there for 2 weeks or 4 months, who knows. Turnover everywhere is high as companies simply pay for GPT rather than hire developers, engineers, hr etc.
It’s about ten times what I used to make in one year.
Also, he had the chance to negotiate a contract. If he didn’t either stand for more up front, or take points on the back end, that’s on him.
So your salary is shit, but that doesn’t mean the director’s is amazing.
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Why didnt you negotiate for a better wage?
What kind of suggestion is this?
“You don’t earn a shitton of money? Well, why don’t you just ask for more?”
Well shit, why didn’t I think about that.
Did. That was the better wage.
That’s what I get for sticking with a job nobody else wants to do, wiping the asses of the elderly, disabled, and dying.
There’s plenty of directors available to direct MCU movies. There’s only one company making them. Not much leverage.
Very true.
The point of doing it wasn’t the direct payment, and I’m pretty sure he said so back a few years ago.
But, if he wasn’t okay with it, that’s on him.
Deadpool made almost a billion dollars. I’m guessing most people haven’t spent 2 years being the person to make something that big and relevant and also got paid less than .03 percent of its revenue…
Acting like the director is the one guy who makes the movie what it is will never make sense to me.
No one said they’re the only person to make a movie, but they literally decide how the movie will turn out, both large-scale and in the details.
It turns out that most Lemmyites are actually pretty wealthy, and hate having that fact pointed out, hence your downvotes. You’re totally right, though.
Relatively it’s not a lot 200k over two years is not that great in terms of Hollywood level
