The Hollywood Reporter announced last week that Jennifer Lawrence isn egotiating for an absolutely massive pay increase for the Hunger Games sequel, Catching Fire. It's not a surprise that she would get a huge pay raise, but it is a little surprising about the scale of the raise.
To break it down, it began two years ago when Lionsgate started making the movie. At that point, Lawrence was not a huge name but she had already been Oscar-nominated and was set to star in the highly anticipated X-men reboot - 'X-men: First class'. Her agents negotiated a 3 or 4 picture deal with the studio, with her paycheck for the first movie at 500,000 plus bonuses based on how the movie performed. Of course, the 'Hunger Games' blew everyone's expectations out of the water and outgrossed what everyone thought it would. Now, at over $650 million worldwide, and one of the highest domestic box offices of all time, the sequel is underway.
Of course, Jennifer Lawrence deserves that raise. If you compare the $10 million to the amount the first movie managed to earn, it's still peanuts. The fact of the matter is, she held every minute of the movie on her presence and acting. Without her, many parts of the movie would have fallen apart or not had as much of an impact. Now the question is what her co-stars, Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson, will ask for their raise? There's no way they'll be able to demand the fee that Lawrence is getting, but Hutcherson should be able to negotiate low to mid millions with no problem.
The real question is Hemsworth - he was barely in the first movie, and while he has a more substantial role in the second one, he's still not going to get the same screentime as his co-stars.
What do you think? Does Jennifer Lawrence deserve $10 million for Catching Fire?
