That Tom Hanks is one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood is no surprise to anyone. However, there was a film in which, due to the high production cost, both the director and the main actor had to reduce their initially agreed salary.
Hanks didn’t just take a pay cut. He completely renounced the fixed salary initially agreed with Paramount in order to continue filming a film that would not only consolidate his career, but would ultimately make him much richer: Forrest Gump.
Who wants a salary when they have a box office. Filming Forrest Gump was a challenge from the beginning. Paramount was suspicious of a story about a man with an intellectual disability that was intertwined with events and symbolic places that had been transcendental in recent decades. As they pointed out in IndieWirethe production budget shot up to $55 million, a huge figure for a drama that left its entire plot in the hands of the protagonists. Without superheroes or film sagas involved.
To alleviate these increased costs, Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis agreed to defer much of their agreed-upon fixed salary. In exchange, they asked for a percentage of gross revenue from the first dollar raised.
A percentage of revenue, not box office. The condition demanded by Hanks and Zemeckis marks an important nuance. If it had claimed a percentage of the box office, the studio would collect all the income, deduct its production costs and deliver the agreed percentage on the rest, which is a much smaller amount.
With the requirement of the percentage of gross income, Hanks and Zemeckis were on equal terms with the studio and would be paid long before Paramount began to deduct expenses. If the film failed, Paramount lost money, but the actor and director would have given away their work.
Forrest Gump’s career was paid for by Hanks. one of The most remembered scenes of the movie are the ones where Gump starts running across the country for no apparent reason, and people start joining him. That scene was almost not filmed due to lack of budget.
Paramount saw it as too expensive and wanted to cut it. Zemeckis wasn’t about to lose her and went to talk to Hanks. In an interview with Hanks on Graham Bensinger’s podcast, the actor recalled the talk he had with the director: “He said, ‘Well, this production is going to cost X amount of dollars.’ And it wasn’t cheap. And I said, ‘Okay.'”
The plan was simple. They put up the money and Paramount returned the favor with a higher percentage of the profits. The studio was delighted to accept because if the film was a failure what they lost was not their money.
Maximum commitment to the film. Financing the popular scene of the bearded Gump running from coast to coast was not the only time Hanks had to dig deep during filming. The budget was so tight that during filming, the weather prevented them from obtaining insurance coverage for certain days, and Paramount refused to assume this new additional expense.
Hanks and Zemeckis once again put money out of their own pockets to pay the insurance and not stop filming. In the same interview, Hanks recalled that, given the financial obstacles that the studio was placing on him, Zemeckis asked him “to be my collaborator, not just my employee.” “It’s a good deal. Let’s do it,” the actor responded. In this way, both became partners who would cover the gaps that the studio did not cover, with the condition of recovering their investment with increasing percentages of box office revenues.
The bet paid for itself.. Forrest Gump was released in July 1994 and, from the first weekend, it swept the box office. It raised more than $677 million worldwide, with more than $330 million in the United States alone according to data from Fox Business. It also won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Hanks.
Thanks to his percentage of gross earnings deal, Hanks earned an estimated $65 million. Almost ten times more than the salary he signed when he accepted the project. According to the portal Celebrity Net Worththe actor’s current fortune is estimated at about $400 million. Not bad for a gamble that started with a scene that the studio refused to pay for.
In | “The best movie ever made” according to Tom Hanks is this classic that, curiously, never appears on the lists
Imagen | Paramount Pictures
