Will Ferrell is the most overpaid actor in Hollywood, according to some people but mostly Forbes

By Sean O'Neal | November 5, 2010 | 6:34pm

Aux Features Film

Forbes Magazine, the nation’s premier source for ranking wealthy people in order of how much you should resent them, has just released its apparently annual list of Hollywood’s Most Overpaid Actors. At the top: all of them, right? I mean, these are people who play dress-up for a living, and anyone who doesn’t do an honest day’s work that involves manual labor or tangential paperwork keeping track of other people’s manual labor is inherently overpaid, ourselves included. At the very least they could throw a baseball really fast.

But no, there is some quantitative justification here for picking the most overpaid, having to do with the gulf between an actor’s salary and the actual box-office take of their movies. Knowing that, you can probably already guess who’s going to be on it, but here’s the list of this year’s biggest actors who aren’t worth what they earn anyway; the numbers next to them represent the average of how much their films took in for every dollar they were paid to do them. Looks like Will Ferrell is still paying mightily for Land Of The Lost, which—given that it’s already led to the ouster of the former heads of Universal—is truly gunning for Waterworld-of-the-‘00s status.