The Cable Guy
dir. Ben Stiller
New Line Cinema

The thing is, The Cable Guy isn’t a bad movie.

And if you’ve seen it, of course, you have your own opinion of it. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve probably heard it’s bad; if you’ve heard it’s bad, then whoever told you that has almost invariably told you, “I can’t believe they paid Jim Carrey $20 million for that.”

That’s half of the major, two-pronged problem that The Cable Guy shares with all the movies since that have featured megastars being paid megastar salaries — all the media-savvy audience members (which, nowadays, is all of them) know what the star was paid, creating an inextricable expectation that can easily sink any performance. You can’t hear a figure like that and not wonder what $20 million of comedy, or action, or drama is worth. (Of course, the touchstone for escalating actresses’ salaries was the $12.5 million, or $6.25 million per, that Demi Moore got paid for Striptease.) And it’s almost impossible, Striptease jokes aside, for the on-screen product to live up to the expectation.

But because Hollywood is not in the business of leaving expectations unfulfilled, a $20 million performance should, by impeccable studio reasoning, be exactly like a $10 million performance, only times two. For Jim Carrey to go from Dumb and Dumber — in which he played a down-on-his-luck nimrod romantic introducing the world to the shtick of first-time directors the Farrelly Brothers — to The Cable Guy — in which he played a maladjusted, Rupert-Pupkin-cubed stalker psycho — was a disastrous enough career move without a $20 million monkey on his back. Which is unfortunate, because it’s a great performance in service of an underdone but nevertheless compelling black comedy. By the time the movie got to its most disappointing point — a resolution-light climax too didactically dependent on the evils of cathode-tube babysitters — it had long since lost its audience due to a different kind of disappointment that was out of its hands.

And that’s just the first prong. Just as potentially damaging is the straightforward economics of salaries like these. Flat salaries are augmented by gross participation — a percentage of profits. Leonardo took home $20 million for The Beach —which was 40 percent of the film’s budget (to be fair, these figures are rarely perfectly reported) — but little more, given the film’s $40 million domestic take and similarly disappointing overseas earnings. On the other hand, Tom Hanks also pocketed $20 million for You’ve Got Mail and doubtless took home at least — at least — 10 percent of the film’s box office, which was $115 domestic. Foreign tickets and videos contribute their fair share. And there are other ancillary markets to consider as well; Jack Nicholson traded his salary for gross participation on both the film and franchising of Batman, and he is estimated to have taken home $50 million.

Studios are always making every effort to make movies as palatable to as many as possible to bring in as much box office as possible. The hole in the bucket that is gross participation only gets bigger as the movie makes more money. Combine two big players — like, say, Hanks and Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, for example, or Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt in the forthcoming The Mexican — and the money goes fast. Suddenly, anything resembling “risky” is, with all due respect to redheaded stepchildren, a redheaded stepchild and quickly shown the door.

This isn’t to say that free-market considerations shouldn’t apply to movie stars — Carrey worked hard for his Cable Guy $20 million. But the scaffolding thrown into place by such frenzied dealmaking may prove to be rickety indeed, and those that stand to be hurt the most are, surprise surprise, movie-goers who’d rather see something new than something familiar but twice as loud.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)