Amid Actors’ Strike, ‘American Pie’ Star Reveals Criminally Low $8000 Salary For His Hit Movie That Earned Over $235 Million: ” I ended up having to work at the LA Zoo”
The studios and producers behind Barbie and Oppenheimer are enjoying great success at the box office, filling their pockets with record early collections.
However, ongoing and future productions of many studios are facing uncertainty due to the recently announced Hollywood strike by around 65,000 actors. Early this month, the cast of Oppenheimer walked out of the movie’s UK premiere to show their support for SAG-AFTRA’s strike.
Read more: Upsetting News For Fans of Pedro Pascal’s ‘The Last of Us 2’ Amid Hollywood Strikes
SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) is fighting to ensure higher payments, pensions, and other necessary contributions for the industry’s performers. It’s good to see the industry is uniting now to increase the trickling down of the profits from men in suits, but the issue has plagued Hollywood for ages.
How Much Was Seann William Scott Paid for the Super Hit Movie
The problem of unfair distribution of wealth in Hollywood has been intensified with the streaming-influenced evolution. The emergence of streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple among others has contributed to a significant decrease in residuals that helped actors get by after the release of their projects.
But even in the old days, not every star used to get a fair size of the slice.
The comedy movie American Pie, which came in 1999, proved to be a huge success, racking over $235 million at the box office, as fans loved the chemistry of four friends and their misfortunes with women. The only true (in his words) stud in the movie was Steve Stifler, the character played by actor Seann William Scott.
Steve might have presented himself as the guy who managed to get all the girls, but behind the scenes, Scott wasn’t bagging (financially speaking) anything impressive, taking home just $8,000 for his brilliantly hilarious role.
Speaking to TV chat show host Rick Elsen, the 46-year-old star said:
“It was a lot of money for me at the time and I would splash out. I remember afterwards I bought a used Thunderbird for like $5000 or maybe $6000. I don’t know what happened to the other $2000 because I ended up having to work at the LA Zoo as a churro guy, so maybe it was even less than $8000.”
Despite his stint at the LA Zoo, Scott continued to feature in the popular teen comedy franchise and finally got a big payday for the franchise’ last released movie, American Reunion. For his appearance in the 2012 film – the fourth installment of American Pie – he earned a reported $5 million.
Will There Be a 5th American Pie Movie?
In American Reunion director Jon Hurwitz showed how Jim Levenstein, Chris “Oz” Ostreicher, Michelle Flaherty, and everyone else apart from Stifler have left their high school antics far behind them in search of a more mature and stable life.
As such, not much was expected with regard to another sequel of a movie that’s considered a trademark coming-of-age teen s*x comedy, especially with the same cast, who are now all in their 40s and 50s.
But Scott has revealed “a great idea” is floating around for a 5th movie despite the challenges of time and evolved expectations from a comedy movie (just look at the layered plot and lines from Greta Gerwig-directed Barbie).
Source: Deadline
Read more: Greta Gerwig Breaks Silence on Brutal Roast on Zack Snyder in Margot Robbie’s ‘Barbie’
