Forbes Star Payback
Hollywood's Best Actors For The Buck
08.24.09, 12:00 PM
Shia LaBeouf tops our list of actors offering studios the most return on investment.


LOS ANGELES -- In today's recessionary Hollywood, studio executives are no longer looking to cast actors who will demand upward of $15 million just to appear in a movie and then a hefty portion of the film's revenue. Instead, the ideal package is a big concept with low-paid stars.

Transformers is the ultimate example. The 2007 film featured actors Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, but the real stars were the massive computer-generated robots that turned into cars. LaBeouf and Fox have their charms, but they're also cheap to hire. DreamWorks didn't have to pay through the nose for LaBeouf and Fox as they would have for actors like Matt Damon and Drew Barrymore.

Thanks to Transformers (and the most recent Indiana Jones movie) LaBeouf, 23, lands at the top of our latest return on investment list. The young actor was lucky enough to catch the eye of Steven Spielberg who has cast him in many of DreamWorks' most lucrative movies. Because of his inexperience and (until recently) unproven ability to draw in audiences, LaBeouf earned relatively small salaries in films that grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. As a result, for every dollar he was paid, LaBeouf's movies returned an average $160 for the studio.

In order to create our list, we looked at the 100 biggest stars in Hollywood. To qualify, each actor had to have starred in at least three movies in the past five years that opened in more than 500 theaters. We did not include animated films because the actors aren't really the draw (pun intended), and they tend to take pay cuts for voice work.

For past lists we have required that actors earn at least $5 million per movie, but we decided to waive that this time around. Studios consider these lower-paid actors key to making money these days and even higher-paid actors are sometimes taking smaller salaries. On Yes Man, for instance, Jim Carrey worked for nothing upfront in exchange for a large share of the film's profits.
ys Radcliffe, his films earn $93.