Forbes List of 10 Most Overpaid Actors

Forbes has released their annual list of the "10 Most Overpaid Actors" in Hollywood and for a second year in a row, Will Ferrell finds himself in the number one spot.

To compile the list, Forbes estimates how much an actor earns on a film, then they analyze the film's gross to determine how much of a return studios get on their investment in a particular actor. They look at actors last three films, then divide the "operating income on those films ... by the star’s total compensation to come up with a return-on-investment number. The final number represents an average of how much a studio earns for every dollar paid."

Most of the names on the list aren't very surprising. Will Ferrell and Eddie Murphy claim the top two spots and names you'd expect like Tom Cruise, Vince Vaughn and Jim Carrey round out the list. (You can see the complete top 10 after the cut.)

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Movie Review - 'Shrek Forever After'

Shrek Forever After Starring Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, and Eddie Murphy Directed by Mike Mitchell Rated PG

A return to form is rare in movie franchises. Usually, if the first film is good, the second is simply bigger, targeting more money. And if there’s a third one, the odds are it’ll be even worse. Should a movie series extend to four entries, it’s typically a very lazy cash transaction. By then, all the good ideas have been drained, children of the main characters have been introduced in a vain attempt to breathe new life into the story, and there’s very little remaining of the charm from the original. That’s what is most surprising about Shrek Forever After (alternately called Shrek: The Final Chapter). Here’s a brand name that had very few artistic aims to begin with, got worse with each movie, and still DreamWorks decided to come back for a fourth attempt. Amazingly enough, Shrek Forever After is really entertaining and is easily the best installment since the first film. In addition to raising its game significantly over the lethargic Shrek the Third, this is the first Shrek in 3-D, and maybe for the first time during this widespread growth in animated movies presented with special glasses, the film actually benefits greatly from the technology. The quiet, normal life no longer suits Shrek (Mike Myers), who secretly longs to go back to the way things were, when being an ogre meant he was feared. Unfortunately, when he vents those feelings to his wife, Fiona (Cameron Diaz), “the way things were” means before he saved her from captivity in the first film. Following the squabble with his wife, Shrek comes upon Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn), who is the Far Far Away version of a predator lender: You make a deal that’s way too expensive for you and way too good for him. In return for spending one day as the ogre he used to be, Shrek gives up a day from his childhood, a day he doesn’t remember.

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The Biggest Flops of the Decade? Not Exactly

Here's the problem I have with a new list by The Hollywood Reporter covering the biggest flops of the decade. When dissecting the movies that lost the most money over the past ten years, The Reporter writes, "Any judgments of flopitude are necessarily subjective." Really? How?

In much the same way that you calculate hits based on money spent versus money earned, flops are determined by how much money they don't make. There are, without question, some enormous failures here, but others are no bigger disappointments than several disasters from the past decade, whether you're looking at percentages or gross dollars, and we'll compare those, too. First, the Reporter list: 1 - The Adventures of Pluto Nash
$100 million/$4.4 million 2 - Battlefield Earth
$75 million/$21 million 3- Land of the Lost
$100 million/$65 million 4 - Gigli
$54 million/$6.1 million 5 - Town and Country
$90 million/$6.7 million 6 - Catwoman
$100 million/$40 million 7 - The Invasion
$80 million/$15.1 million 8 - Rollerball
$70 million/$19 million 9 - Grindhouse
$67 million/$25 million 10- The Spirit
$60 million/$19.8 million I don't think anyone is proud of those movies, but you can tell just by looking that the ten films they have aren't even in the proper order. How is Land of the Lost a bigger flop than Town and Country or The Invasion, just looking at the raw numbers? Ah: Subjectivity. Then why even list the dollars?

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Rosewood and Taggart Back for 'Beverly Hills Cop 4'?

Another sequel will pretend part of its own history never happened: Beverly Hills Cop 4 will take place with willful disregard for parts two and three. To confuse matters a little further, the film might actually be called Beverly Hills Cop, which would make you think it's a remake. That's also untrue. It's just a sequel pretending the previous sequels don't exist and it's not called Cop 4 because in terms of this movie, it's part two. But calling it Cop 2 wouldn't make much sense, not that any of this does.

Moviehole reports that, in keeping with the part-four-is-really-part-two business, we'll see the return of detective John Taggart (John Ashton). That's in addition to Judge Reinhold, who was supposedly OK with returning a few months ago. Of course, Eddie Murphy's back as Axel Foley, exponentially raising ticket sales among Hollywood-based transvestite hookers.

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Eddie Murphy Out, Marlon Wayans In As Richard Pryor

If they could make a great (but admittedly mostly fictional) movie about Mozart, as Milos Forman did with the brilliant Amadeus, then I guess they can make a movie about another one- of-a-kind performer like Richard Pryor. That's the plan, and somehow it involves Marlon Wayans.

Now, Pryor, if you're younger than, say, 30, is just about everything you need to know about contemporary stand-up comedy. He's kind of the Beatles of that art form, incorporating everything that came before him, turning it into something completely new, and inspiring everything that came after him as well as his contemporaries. So his life story is certainly worthy fodder for a bio-pic, so I have no problem with that. Bill Condon, who directed Dreamgirls, has a script, which previously had Eddie Murphy attached as his mentor. The screenplay wound up at Sony and Happy Madison, but Murphy did not. Why? Probably because Paramount was originally going to produce the film and Murphy has delivered two huge losers for that studio in the past 18 months.

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