One of the biggest box office bonanzas of recent memory is "Barbie" starring Margot Robbie as the titular doll (or at least one of them). After the box office receipts from the weekend of August 26-27 were counted, Barbie's worldwide gross officially topped $1.342 billion.
Barbie is now the highest-grossing Warner Bros. movie ever, surpassing "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part II" (which earned $1.341 billion in 2011). It's the first billion-dollar grosser to be directed solely by a woman, and it's almost in striking distance of being the biggest grosser of 2023, right behind "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," which grossed $1.359 billion.
All of these revenue stats are very good news for Margot Robbie because not only did she star in Barbie. She was also one of the film's producers. She was therefore rewarded with a healthy backend bonus structure which will ensure a payday of at least…
$50 million
Another person who is likely seeing some big checks as a result of the success of "Barbie" is director Greta Gerwig, who likely has similar box office bonus incentives built into her contract, although they're probably not quite as lucrative as movie star Robbie's.
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Margot Robbie was one of the shepherds of the project, producing it through her LuckyChap Entertainment production company. Previous projects under the LuckyChap banner include "Promising Young Woman" and "Birds of Prey" (which starred Robbie). "Barbie," is, of course, the biggest box office success to be produced by LuckyChap to date. It's also the biggest box office hit of Robbie's impressive career as a film star.
Robbie reportedly has plenty of reasons to celebrate what has been both a critical, commercial, and crowd-pleasing success, and "Barbie" isn't even out of theaters yet. It's been out for almost a month and it's still the number one movie in America, so the money is going to keep rolling in for a while yet.
Margot's $50 million pay day is impressive, but unless she bumps that up by another $10 – $20 million (which very well might happen), it's still not quite enough to be one of largest acting paydays of all time for a single movie. And that's without adjusting for inflation. If you take inflation into account, she has a long, long way to go.
