Back in the day, audiences were drawn to movies based primarily on who was the leading star, according to Business Insider. To guarantee the success of these flicks, big name actors like Tom Cruise and Will Smith were paid top dollar be attached to them, which was an instant recipe for making tons of money.

Even though the audiences these days gravitate towards franchises like the Avengers or Star Wars, the biggest stars in Hollywood still are able to make the big bucks and bring in the movie-going crowd.

Check out the highest paid movie roles of all time.

Oh, you’re about to be very jealous:

Leonardo DiCaprio earned a pretty R627,6 million for his role as Dom Cobb in Inception. And this is just from the box office earnings, home video and television sales. Apparently, DiCaprio took a pay cut because the movie was so “risky”.

Maybe then he could have ended up higher on this list.

Tied with DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson also earned R627,6 million for his role as the Joker in the 1989 Batman flick. His take was only R75,2 million upfront, but he managed to secure a lucrative deal that included box office earnings and merchandise sales from its sequels that he didn’t even appear in.

Whew. Nicholson laughed all the way to the bank with this one.

Johnny Depp‘s Jack Sparrow act is getting boring, but as long as he’s raking in the dough, he’ll probably keep playing the swashbuckling buccaneer ’til thine kingdom come.

For the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film – “On Stranger Tides” – Depp bagged R690,7 million.

Yo ho ho!

If an actor’s salary was like a box of chocolates, Tom Hanks didn’t know what he was going to get. For his eponymous role in Forrest Gump, he opted for a performance-based pay. That netted Hanks a respectable R753 million.

Harrison Ford, playing the role of the adventurous Indiana Jones, only did the fourth Indiana Jones movie – “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” – when Paramount agreed to a deal that split a large portion of the film’s earnings between him, director Steven Spielberg, and producer George Lucas.

His earnings? R817 million.

That’s an expensive nostalgia rush right there.

Heeeere’s Johnny … again.

Playing the Mad Hatter in Alice In Wonderland, Johnny Depp was paid R855 million. Mad, isn’t it?

The only lady to make this list, Sandra Bullock was paid over R251 million upfront for her role as Dr Ryan Stone in Gravity. But her deal also included 15% of box office revenue. In the end, Bullock earned R880,3 million in total.

What an astronomical figure, wouldn’t you say?

For his fourth outing as Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Tom Cruise‘s paycheck came to a R942,8 million, propelling him to the top of Forbes’ most powerful actors list in 2012.

Will Smith brought back Agent J for Men In Black 3 and, like Hanks, opted for a performance-based pay. He made a lekker R1,25 billion off the film’s total R7,84 billion gross. Nice!

Keanu Reeves is the one … number one on this list, that is.

His role as Neo in The Matrix trilogy has earned him the combined pay of R3,14 billion. Good job, Keanu.

This acting stuff is a tough gig.

[source:businessinsider]