Macaulay Culkin got $110,000 for “Home Alone.” The movie made $476 million. Two years later, he reportedly got $4.5 million for the sequel, plus a cut of every Talkboy sold. In the video below, Hot Ones host Sean Evans asks him why “Home Alone 2” is better than the first. His answer: “I got paid more.” He was nine when they shot the first film. It was a modestly budgeted Christmas comedy, and nobody expected a global hit. For the sequel, he became the highest-paid child actor in Hollywood at the time, reportedly. That is about 40 times what he got for the first film. The money did not stop there. “I think I owned 5% of the net,” he says. He also had 15% of the merchandising. That meant the Talkboy, the little recorder Kevin uses in the movie. “If you buy a Talkboy, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’ll take 15% of that.’” The sequel made over $350 million on a budget of about $28 million. The case for the studio: it hired a nine-year-old with almost no track record for a movie nobody expected to work. $110,000 was a normal child-actor fee. The big money came only after he proved he could carry a franchise. So did Culkin get underpaid for the first film, or did the second one make up for it?

Arnold Schwarzenegger took no salary for Twins. The movie made $216 million. He says it paid him more than $40 million. More than any movie he has ever made, including The Terminator. In the video below, Andy Cohen asks which film earned his biggest paycheck, then starts guessing the number. He has said Universal doubted an action star could carry a comedy. So Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito and director Ivan Reitman skipped their salaries and took a piece of the back end. The budget was under $20 million. Cohen asks: more than $20 million? “Much more,” Arnold says. More than $40 million? He says it was more than that. A sequel, Triplets, was planned, with Eddie Murphy as the third brother. It never happened after Reitman died in 2022. The case for the studio: it was betting on an action star in a comedy he had never done. Skipping salaries kept the risk low. Nobody expected the film to become his biggest payday. So did Universal protect its budget the smart way, or hand Arnold the best deal of his career?

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In 2019, Scooter Braun bought the label that owned Taylor Swift’s music, in a deal reported at over $300 million. In 2025, she reportedly paid about $360 million to get it back. In the video below, Taylor tells Travis Kelce how it really happened. She signed her first record deal at 15, and says she “never owned my music at all.” That is how most record deals work. The label owns the masters, and the artist doesn’t. She says she started saving money to buy her songs back when she was a teenager. The first time her catalog was sold, she says it “ripped my heart out.” So she started re-recording her albums, because it was the only way she thought she could ever own them. When she began in 2021, she says most of the industry trades called it a bad idea. After the Eras Tour, she decided to approach the current owner, the private equity firm Shamrock Capital. She wanted to buy her music outright, not own 30% of it. She didn’t send lawyers. She sent her mom and her brother. “I would so much rather lead heart first,” she says. This wasn’t about returns. It was her handwritten diary entries, her photography and her music videos. A couple of months after the Super Bowl, her mom called. They had said yes. Taylor says she “very dramatically hit the floor” and started sobbing. At 35, she finally owned everything she wrote as a teenager. The case for the buyers: Braun and Shamrock paid market price for an asset the label legally owned. Taylor signed that contract herself, at a time when the standard deal gave the label the masters. So was it fair that she had to buy her own songs, or is that just how the music business works?

In 1975, Sylvester Stallone was so broke he sold his dog. Then a studio offered him $360,000 for a script he wrote in 3 days. He said no. In the video below, Stallone tells CBS’s Tracy Smith why: “I said, pass. I can’t do it.” He was living in New York with pizza boxes for a mattress. He cleaned the lion cages at the Central Park Zoo. By March 1975 the Rocky script was finished, and he was still flat broke. The dog was the only thing he had left to sell. “It’s the only thing I could sell,” he says. Producers wanted the script. They just didn’t want Stallone to play Rocky. The offers kept climbing until they reached $360,000. His answer never changed: he plays Rocky or he walks. “I’ve literally crawled through every gutter in New York,” he says. He was sure he would never get a chance like this again. In the end, the studio gave in. Reportedly he was paid $35,000 for the script. The first thing he did was buy his dog back and put him in the movie. Rocky won three Oscars and became one of the biggest hits of its time. This November, a film about Stallone’s fight to make it, I Play Rocky, comes out in theaters. The case for the studio: Stallone was an unknown actor with almost no credits. Nobody knew if a boxing movie could work, and $360,000 for a first script was a fortune. So was saying no the best bet in Hollywood history, or just the luckiest?

Jim Carrey wrote himself a $10 million check when he had almost nothing. He dated it Thanksgiving 1995. In the video below, Carrey tells Oprah Winfrey how he did it, on her show in 1997. In the late 1980s, he says, he was broke and unknown. He would picture directors taking an interest in his work. He says it just made him feel better. Then he wrote the check: $10 million, "for acting services rendered." He kept it in his wallet. He says it deteriorated over time. In 1994, he starred in Ace Ventura, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber. He reportedly earned $540,000 for The Mask. Reports put his Dumb and Dumber pay at $7 million. His co-star Jeff Daniels reportedly got $50,000. The next year, he reportedly earned $15 million for Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Later he became the first actor paid $20 million for a film, according to Business Insider. On the show, Carrey says he found out just before Thanksgiving 1995 that he would make $10 million on Dumb and Dumber. Then he adds a warning: "You can't just visualize and then, you know, go eat a sandwich." The case for the skeptics: the check came due only after three hit films in one year, and Carrey told the story so often that Spy magazine mocked him for it. So was the check a plan, or just a good story told after the fact?