From bust to boom: Arnold Schwarzenegger reveals his biggest and smallest Hollywood paychecks
How smart bets, unlikely comedies, and relentless reinvention turned an action star into a franchise, brand, and pop culture force.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is a big, big Hollywood name. Terminator, Twins, The Running Man, Total Recall, True Lies. Some of the biggest blockbusters of the ’80s and ’90s.
Of course we will never know the precise amount the Austrian muscleman has banked, in part because for some films he took a share of profits rather than a paycheck, but estimates put his career earnings well over $500 million.
What were Schwarzenegger’s biggest and smallest Hollywood paychecks?
This summer for Variety he sat down to interview his son, Patrick, who is also an actor and has starred in The White Lotus and The Staircase, among others. And in the very entertaining chat between the two (worth a watch), Arnold spills the tea on his biggest and smallest Hollywood paychecks — kind of.
As to what the biggest film was, Arnold says he was desperate to get to the top of Hollywood. For him that meant getting to the level of the biggest earners. “When I came to America, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson were the highest-paid actors, with a million dollars a movie. I said, ‘I’ve got to be part of that.’ Eventually I made $30 million a movie, and I caught up with those guys.”
The movie he was widely reported as actually making $30 million for was Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, where he picked up a salary of $29,250,000 plus around 20 percent of profits.
His first really big paydays were at the end of the ’80s, when he reportedly got $3.5 million for Predator, $5 million for The Running Man, and $8 million for Red Heat.
Mind-blowingly, given the impact it had on his career, 1984’s The Terminator paid him just $75,000, a far cry from the $15 million he landed for the 1991 sequel.
What was the smallest salary Schwarzenegger picked up?
The bodybuilder explains in the interview with his son that his smallest salary ever was for Twins. That is because he did not get one. As Schwarzenegger explains, nobody wanted to make the movie. “So I said, ‘Why don’t we all three take no money.’ If we do not take any salaries, we can shoot the movie for $16.5 million. We worked out a deal where we got 40 percent of the back end of the movie. It happened to be the best deal we have ever made.”
Estimates put that back end at around $40 million. Which probably more than makes up for taking no salary.
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