Mark Wahlberg Highest Paid Actor

Women, and the men who are scared of them, are already complaining about how much money Mark Wahlberg, and second place earner, The Rock, make in annual movie pay compared to leading actresses. It’s easy to complain about numbers when eliminating science from your arguments. 

Wahlberg hauled in $68 million which shouldn’t cause you to scream “gender inequality!” but rather, wow, an industry where talent and skill are not even close to the primary drivers of salary. Wahlberg can’t act. It’s not particularly disputable. Outside of his ability to play himself with a severe Boston accent in cop or boxer movies, his range as an actor is clearly and significantly limited. But he’s steroid buff and guys like him and women adore him. Argue the logic of that elsewhere. Dude sells tickets. As does The Rock, who also can’t act, but took second place. Vin Diesel, third place. He may be a worse actor than Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson. They’re all the Jacksonville Jaguars of acting. 

If shitty female actresses could open tentpole action films like Fast & Furious and Transformers in 118 countries, they too would top the list. Kaley Cuoco makes $25 million a year for twelve weeks a year filming Big Bang Theory. She’s not Meryl Streep, but she hit a sweet spot for some TV demographic who can’t get enough. Meanwhile, thousands of skilled and finely honed thespians of both genders toil for peanuts. It’s show business, not acting. 

The alternative is to pay everybody the same for the same amount of work. You act for six weeks on set, you get the same paycheck no matter who you are. It’s called Communism. It’s 0-for-Forever in terms of success rates. Binge watch Soviet era movies and television. CBS prime time shows will suddenly seem watchable. Thanks God, Blue Bloods is on!

Female celebrities enjoy the benefit of being far more valuable offscreen in terms of commercial value. The top tier famous ladies can and often do earn tens of millions a year in commercial endorsements for fashion, diet products, cosmetics, and other categories that represent a massive bulk of influencer marketing wherein the influencers are almost always women. Jennifer Lawrence moaned about making five mill less on a film than her male counterparts while raking in forty million in worldwide commercial contracts the same year.

Hollywood is run largely by women, gay men, and French bankers desperately pretending not to be gay men. All they care about is money. There is no screw-the-female-workers policy going on. There is raw, pure, cold economics. It’s called unfair by the people who have trouble with the way the world works.

None of this will stop the reflexive sloganeers on social media from decrying gender pay gap. It’s their thing. Treat them as flat-earthers. Smile and understand they have nothing else. 

_{Photo Credit: Splash News}