The eye-watering $60 million paydays that Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel and Josh Gad are pulling down to voice their characters in upcoming Disney Animation sequels “Frozen 3” and “4” may seem, to some, like a staggering amount of money to pay for a job that can be completed in your sweatpants.
But it’s more of a natural progression than a bolt from the blue.
TheWrap exclusively reported on Wednesday that the three lead actors of “Frozen” have struck a deal worth more than $60 million each, which may make them the highest-paid actors in animation history should both films be produced and find success. “Frozen” is arguably the most lucrative franchise in the company’s empire right now, with two films that each grossed north of $1 billion, theme park attractions and merch that rakes in billions of dollars every year.
Not that everyone’s happy about it.
“It’s insane to me that the combined talent budget for three stars is essentially the price of the film — stars who also get huge paydays from residuals while the directors and artists who spend years of their lives making those films get paid pennies in comparison and never see a dime in royalties off of characters whose images generate billions,” one animation director who requested anonymity told TheWrap, adding that Bill Schwab designed the character of Olaf but gets paid a fraction of what Gad is pulling down.
“I’m fine with voice talent being compensated. My issue is with the imbalance,” the director added.
But that imbalance goes back further than you think.
While the outsized paydays for Bell, Menzel and Gad personify the value of the actors to this golden franchise, they aren’t actually all that unique. In fact, this can be traced back to a single, all-important moment in the history of animation and voice acting.
A man and a painting
In a deal brokered by mega-agent Michael Ovitz, and as the film barreled toward a planned 1992 release, Robin Williams signed on to play the Genie in Walt Disney Animation’s “Aladdin.” This was unusual — hits like “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Little Mermaid” leaned on seasoned voice actors whose names were largely unknown to the public. But the bet would pay off and, ultimately, change movie history.
Williams was already part of the Disney family. He had starred in Robert Altman’s comic-strip-come-to-life “Popeye,” a co-production with Paramount Pictures, in 1980; 1987’s “Good Morning, Vietnam,” completed after Williams’ very public stint in rehab for cocaine addiction (at the time Williams joked that Disney cast its films by hanging out at the back door of the Betty Ford Clinic); and 1989’s “Dead Poets Society,” which earned Williams a Best Actor Oscar nomination. Williams also co-starred in “Back to Neverland,” a short film that ran as part of the Magic of Walt Disney Animation attraction at the newly opened Disney-MGM Studios.
The actor was allegedly grateful for the career boost “Dead Poets Society” provided and agreed to do “Aladdin” “for a scale wage of less than $500 a day,” wrote James B. Stewart in “Disney War,” a far cry from his $8 million rate at the time. In Ovitz’s memoir, he said that Williams was slated for three days of voice-over work for all of “Aladdin” but that “his ad-libbing was so wildly funny and prolific that Michael Eisner tossed the script aside and rebuilt the movie around Robin – without revising his compensation.”
The movie grossed more than $502 million worldwide and won two Oscars for Best Song and Best Score, along with five Grammys. Much of that success had to do with Williams’ performance, which was often singled out in reviews and generated a healthy amount of Oscar buzz (if nominated, Williams would have been the first voice performance to do so). As such, Disney promoted the film on the back of Williams’ performance, a decision that made the actor uneasy. It was the first animated Disney movie to achieve substantial critical and commercial success with a major movie star.
Ovitz recounted that he told Eisner that Williams “didn’t want any more money, but that he deserved a significant gesture of recognition for what he’d done for Disney.” Eisner agreed to give Williams a painting; Ovitz claimed in his memoir that he was the one who picked out the Picasso at the Pace Gallery, a painting worth around $4 million. When Eisner tried to suggest that Disney owned the painting and would lend it to Williams, Ovitz shot back, “If I didn’t have a client as nice as Robin, I’d demand $15 million.”
Needless to say, Williams got the Picasso.
It would take decades for a voice actor to command the $15 million for an animated feature that Ovitz threatened, but Williams’ experience on “Aladdin” would inform how deals like it would be made, particularly when it came to the lucrative world of sequels.
A dissatisfied Williams refused to work with the company for years after that, later returning to voice the Genie in “Aladdin and the King of Thieves,” a more cost-effective direct-to-video sequel released in 1996. This time he was paid $1 million. It sold over 10 million units and was the sixth highest-selling VHS tape of the year.
A paradigm shift
Up until “Aladdin,” made under the leadership of Eisner and his bullish studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg, Disney animated films had featured a mixture of actual stars (like Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor in 1977’s “The Rescuers” and its 1990 sequel) and performers more notable for their voice work (like the sublime Phil Harris, who provided voices for 1967’s “The Jungle Book,” 1970’s “The Aristocats” and 1973’s “Robin Hood”).
What changed with “Aladdin” was that the movie was made and marketed as a star vehicle.
Disney continued to cast based on its long-held edict – the right voice for the job, not the starriest or most well-known. Although casting Demi Moore as the seductive Esmeralda in 1997’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” released the same summer as her sexy “Striptease,” certainly raised some eyebrows, it probably didn’t translate to additional box office.
But things changed when Katzenberg left the studio in 1994 and set up DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. As head of the DreamWorks Animation studio, Katzenberg set out to replicate the magic of “Aladdin” by casting the biggest stars in his animated movies.
The studio’s first two movies, both released in 1998, were loaded with name actors – “Antz” featured Woody Allen, Gene Hackman, Jennifer Lopez, Sharon Stone and Sylvester Stallone. “The Prince of Egypt” had Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum, Helen Mirren, Steve Martin and Martin Short.
Sometimes Katzenberg’s gambit worked, like with “Shrek,” led by Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz, which grossed nearly half a billion dollars and spawned a beloved franchise. But sometimes it failed spectacularly, most notably with 2003’s “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,” which starred Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones and was a notorious flop.
“Voice talent never draws box office,” said one director with experience in live-action and animation. This was the commonly-held belief at the time, and yet the stars were still cast, and they kept getting paid more and more money.
Bigger paychecks, more regularly
For the first “Shrek,” the principal actors — Myers, Murphy and Diaz — deferred their upfront salaries and earned more than $3 million each from their share of the domestic gross. For the 2004 sequel, they were paid $10 million each. For the third and fourth films, that number reportedly jumped to the $15 million range. With “Shrek 5” coming in 2027, and considering the bumps in the previous sequels, there’s a world in which they each get paid $20 million to return.
That’s not far off from the $30 million-ish that Menzel, Bell and Gad will make for each of the two “Frozen” sequels, which is believed to be close to $20 million for their upfront fee with the balance as a bonus tied to box office performance.
But sometimes these big paychecks can lead to internal friction.
Reports swirled last year that the reason Mindy Kaling and Bill Hader declined to reprise their voice roles for “Inside Out 2” was because Disney/Pixar rejected their salary demands. Meanwhile Amy Poehler’s pay for the eventual $1.7 billion-grossing sequel was bumped to $10 million.
For Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Moana 2,” also released last year, Dwayne Johnson reportedly was paid around $20 million to reprise his role as rascally demigod Maui. Again: not far off from Menzel, Bell and Gad.
And animated sequels do well. When Tim Allen and Tom Hanks starred in the first “Toy Story” in 1997, they made less than $50,000 each. By the time “Toy Story 2” rolled around in 1999, they made $5 million upfront and a cut of the home video sales for the movie (hey, it was 1999). It grossed $500 million. By the third film, which grossed $1 billion, they earned an estimated $15 million each. While it’s unclear what they netted for 2019’s “Toy Story 4” (another $1 billion in box office) and “Toy Story 5” (out next summer), odds are slim they took a pay cut.
Disney is undoubtedly worried about what the paychecks for their “Frozen” leads will mean to their own business and the industry as a whole. For example, how much will the trio of actors and singers get to return for the “KPop Demon Hunters” sequel after the first film has become the most-watched movie in Netflix history?
But in an environment beset by contraction, consolidation and fewer box office sure-things, ponying up for the “Frozen” stars is not just cutting them in on one of the studio’s biggest moneymakers. It’s insurance that the “Frozen” money train will keep rolling on for years to come.
