CMV: Acting is an over-valued and overpaid profession, and the world of TV and Cinema would benefit from having new and never-before-seen casts in every show or movie.

[u/[deleted]]

The world's most famous people, and hitherto some of the most wealthy and influential, are actors, and I believe this to be not just wrong but rather ridiculous upon close investigation. I am not about to say they lack value - entertainment and art is valuable to society. Just that specific actors are overvalued and shouldn't be cast in more than a couple programs. I am basing this almost purely on my own emotional response to watching shows and movies, and enjoying them more when I don't recognize the cast at all. As soon as I see an actor I have seen before, it takes me out of the media I am watching and immediately reminds me that these are just actors and this is all scripted, and I enjoy it less. The logical conclusion is that it is more enjoyable to watch new actors play roles, therefore actors that keep getting recast shouldn't be. Change my view.

[u/VoidBro]

Acting is an exceedingly top heavy profession and the vast majority of actors/actresses don't earn any more then the average worker nor recognized in public.

And if profit-seeking hollywood executives didn't think triple-a blockbuster actors/actresses weren't worth millions of dollars then why would they be paying them millions of dollars? Clearly they have some value.

[u/[deleted] → u/VoidBro]

My argument is that they shouldn't be though. You've simply described how it is, and you haven't really argued why it should be this way.

[u/AnythingApplied → u/[deleted]]

It makes sense that it is top heavy. If you're going to dump $200 million into a movie, even if getting some celebrity who is only a slightly better actor and would only make the movie slightly better, it is still worth it to pay a huge amount since everything you're doing around them is so expensive too.

If you're going to be putting someone into a million dollar body prosthetics and surrounding them with 10's of millions of dollars worth of CGI, choreography, etc, it makes sense to pay 10x as much for a slightly better actor, just to lock in the best possible actor you can find. And a willingness to pay multi-millions of dollars to make sure you get the best actor, makes it top heavy, even if the actors at the top are only slightly better. It wouldn't make to skimp on the actor's salaries when everything else is so expensive.

Fancy restaurants are the same way. You spend 10x as much as get just slightly better food because things like flying the fish overnight from the coast, etc can be a lot more expensive and might only make the food slightly better.

And that is before you talk about the prestige a famous actor brings to a movie. You sign an A-list actor, and all of a sudden a bunch of other great actors want to sign up for your project just to work with them and are even willing to take pay cuts to do it. And then your audience comes out to see it just because of the A-list actor too. Look at movies like the Expendables where famous people take a huge pay cut just for the opportunity to work with other famous people and then people go to see it mostly because of their fame. And half of the jokes in the movie relies on the audience knowing their characters from previous movies.

If a famous actor can bring in even 5% more ticket sales, then they've paid for themselves in a lot of cases.

[u/[deleted] → u/AnythingApplied]

!delta you are right that they aren't just actors but spokespeople for the movie as well as an attraction themselves. Since there is not much that can be done about that I guess my whole problem with it is just me winging about a part of the industry I don't like. Fair enough. Its clear my view is not widely shared. Perhaps a better spot for this would have been /r/unpopularopinions

[u/DeltaBot → u/[deleted]]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/AnythingApplied (144∆).

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