Margot Robbie might be looking to buy a brand-new Malibu dream house, and then some. According to Variety, Robbie stands to make approximately $50 million on Barbie, between her salary and box office bonuses in her dual role as star and producer.
Robbie’s massive payday is due to the incredible success of the film, which got off to a smashing start as one half of the “Barbenheimer” craze. To date, Barbie has earned $526.4 million at the domestic box office and $660.6 million at the international box office for a grand total of roughly $1.19 billion globally, and it’s still going. Over the weekend, Barbie became the second-highest-grossing film in Warner Bros. history, just behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011), which made approximately $1.3 billion worldwide. It’s also officially made Greta Gerwig the highest-grossing female director of all time, surpassing the codirector of Frozen II, Jennifer Lee.
On top of starring in Barbie, Robbie’s production company, LuckyChap, which she founded in 2014 with Josey McNamara, Sophia Kerr, and her husband, Tom Ackerley, produced the film, so Robbie stands to make a killing on box office bonuses as well. Robbie was hands-on as a producer, rescuing the project from almost 10 years of developmental hell by re-pitching it to studios. In her pitch, Robbie noted that Barbie had the potential to be a big success, saying that the film could make $1 billion. “I think I told them that it’d make a billion dollars, which maybe I was overselling, but we had a movie to make, okay?!” said Robbie in an interview with Collider.
Barbie also adds another feather to Robbie’s cap as an actor, which includes celebrated turns in films like The Wolf of Wall Street, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and an Oscar nomination for I, Tonya. As a producer, Robbie’s LuckyChap has been behind Birds of Prey, Netflix’s Maid, and the Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman. Just last year, some folks on the internet considered Robbie “box office poison” due to her leading roles in two back-to-back flops, David O. Russell’s Amsterdam and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon. Clearly, they had no idea what Robbie and Barbie were capable of.
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