This Is the Actor Who Made Hollywood the Most Money

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 4, 8:20AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

This Is the Actor Who Made Hollywood the Most Money — © Courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

For an actor, winning an Academy Award may be the pinnacle of a career. Yet, when the ceremonies are over, Hollywood judges performers by a different standard: box office numbers. You can bet that producers and production companies keep close track of which actors have the best track records when it comes to selling tickets.

24/7 Tempo has picked the actor whose films have made the most money over the years. As the results show, it is definitely a man’s world. The top 14 slots of the finalists for this choice go to men. The top-rated woman, Cameron Diaz, cracks the list at number 15, but she hasn’t made a major film since she played Hannigan in 2014’s “Annie.” The highest grossing of her 29 movies is “Shrek 2,” which brought in $441.2 million.

The next woman on the list is Emma Watson at number 17. The biggest moneymaker of her 16 films is 2017’s “Beauty and the Beast,” which tallied $504.0 million. She also built her box office success on the Harry Potter franchise.

The men who made the top 10 on the finalist list have each had starring roles thus far in at least 23 movies and brought in at least $3.5 billion each to date.
[nativounit]
Robert Downey Jr. is the actor who has made Hollywood the most money. Here are the details:

> Total career domestic box office: $5.4 billion
> Career lead roles: 27
> Average domestic box office: $200.7 million per movie
> Highest grossing film: “Avengers: Endgame” (2019) ($858.4 million)

Our methodology: To determine the actor that made Hollywood the most money, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed data on domestic box office from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), an online movie database owned by Amazon; Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator; and The Numbers, an online movie database owned by consulting firm Nash Information Services. Domestic box office was tallied for each actor across all the movies in which they had a starring role. Only films for which an actor was listed among the top four stars of the movie on IMDb were included in each actor’s tally. Data was collected mid-March 2021.

Click here to see the 32 actors that made Hollywood the most money.
[wallst_email_signup]

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.