Jamie Dornan, Dakota Johnson Win Big With 'Fifty Shades Of Grey;' Actors To Earn Millions With Sequel
"Fifty Shades of Grey" casts Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson are set to earn a big payday with the sequels.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the 32-year-old actor and the 25-year-old model are expected to renegotiate their contracts to secure a hefty raise.
Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson signed a three-picture deal for "Fifty Shades of Grey" and reportedy earned $250,000 each for the first movie. However, a renegotiation in payment is standard practice if the film does well in the box-office.
Although the film did relatively well in the domestic market by raking in $157,463,950; it's the foreign box-office where it exploded by earning $371,300,000, comprising about 70% of its total income on a $40 million budget, said Box Office Mojo.
For big stars, and sometimes for relative unknowns, they negotiate backend incentives while receiving a smaller amount upfront. That's not the case with Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson for "Fifty Shades of Grey."
"Though the two leads probably are six months away from any renegotiations," said THR. "Insiders say they'll take a page from the 'Twilight' stars and Jennifer Lawrence's 'Hunger Games' deal as a jumping-off point (Lawrence landed a $10 million payday for 'Catching Fire' - a significant bump from her $500,000 Hunger Games salary)."
But Scott Mendelson of Forbes magazine doesn't believe that Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson might not get a big raise for the "Fifty Shades of Grey" sequel.
"The irony is that the artistic weakness of 'Fifty Shades of Grey' (the characters are relative blank slates) is the very thing that makes the actors (who did their damndest to elevate the material) expendable or at least at a disadvantage when negotiating the kind of pay raises that they perhaps expected the next time around," he wrote.
He said that "Fifty Shades of Grey" won big at the box-office not because of Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson but because of "subject matter, the popularity of its source material, and the years of pre-release controversy and media attention."
