November 18, 2009

Ferrell sucks, there I said it

Has Will Ferrell followed the steps of Adam Sandler as being one the most famous people ever, and then crashing back to earth with an incredible flop? You can't really argue with that considering his latest movies which have received critical pans and bombed at the box office. Now Forbes has named him the most overpaid actor in show business.

Looks like "Land of the Lost" has earned star Will Ferrell the dubious distinction of being the most overpaid actor in show business, according to the list makers at Forbes magazine.

Forbes looked at 100 top actors based on their widely released films over the past five years. It factored in the production costs of those movies against how much boxoffice, DVD and other revenue they generated in order to come up with an operating income for each film, which it then compared with the salaries the stars earned.

In Ferrell's case, the actor's films earned just $3.29 for every dollar he was paid. That's a pretty poor contrast to the $160 that Shia LaBeouf's movies returned to the studios for every buck he earned.

That figure, by the way, put LaBeouf -- who starred in "Transformers" in 2007 and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" in 2008 -- at the top of Forbes list of Best Actors for the Buck. Also included on that list were Robert Downey Jr., Christian Bale and Dennis Quaid.

"Land of the Lost," a boxoffice dud starring Ferrell as an offbeat scientist, racked up about $100 million in production costs, not including marketing, but only returned $65 million at the worldwide boxoffice. His movie "Semi-Pro," which earned $44 million at the worldwide boxoffice, has also dragged down Ferrell's return-on-investment performance lately.

This has always struck me as odd considering that Ferrell himself is still a pretty funny dude, but it just seems like the crap he gets himself into is his downfall. He was also overexposed to the point where you couldn't go to the grocery store without being thrown some sort of Ferrell-ism. That kind of stuff causes your shtick to get old quick, and in the world of comedy, your lifespan in terms of popularity can be pretty dawn short.

But hey, that doesn't mean he's poor or anything...

(Found this on Media Chow)

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