Let’s just start by saying: top Hollywood actors are paid crazy money. But what completely sucks about this insanely lucrative job is how much less the top women actors are paid than the top men are; as Jennifer Lawrence found out when the Sony hack revealed how much less she had been paid than her male co-stars for American Hustle.
With that as background, it’s really great to hear reports that Scarlett Johansson, chameleonic hero of both the indie flick and action blockbuster, is raking in $20 million for her work on Avengers: Age of Ultron, in which she plays Black Widow. Her salary dwarfs those of co-stars Chris Evans (not that one) on $6.9m playing Captain America, Jeremy Renner on $6.1m as Hawkeye, Chris Hemsworth’s $5.4m as Thor, and Mark Ruffalo’s $2.8 million as Hulk.
Many had assumed that Johansson’s pay packet might have been disappointing, considering Marvel didn’t produce any Black Widow merchandise at the time of the film’s release — though they later did, after a massive outcry — and don’t seem keen on making any stand-alone films about their female characters, despite a number of spin-off flicks for the male characters.
Johansson did lose out to Robert Downey Jr., who is basically making a Monopoly-money mockery of the wages the world over by netting $40 million for his turn as Iron Man in the film. He is the highest paid actor alive though, so that was probably inevitable; but is he really worth double?