Margot Robbie is about to have more in common with Monoply’s “Rich Uncle” Pennybags than her plastic alter ego.
As Barbie continues to lay waste to box office expectations, Robbie stands to make enough to buy an original Earring Magic Ken. In fact, she could buy about 222,000 Earring Magic Kens.
Per Variety, Robbie will reportedly make $50 million off the billion-dollar grossing Barbie. The payday will be in salary and box office grosses, making her this generation’s Jack Nicholson, who made so much money on the backend of Batman that he was willing to wear a Batman pin in interviews for the DVD. Though he got some of the merchandising profits, as well—pray that Robbie got some of that “I am Kenough” sweatshirt money.
Robbie deserves a lot of credit for the film’s success on many fronts. First of all, she wasn’t only an actor in the film. Technically, she was brought on as a producer before slipping seamlessly in and out of her extremely high arches, and it was Robbie who reportedly convinced Greta Gerwig to take the trip to Barbie Land.
Robbie didn’t necessarily want to play Barbie—she thought Gal Gadot would bring the right amount of “dorky” energy to the role. For her part, Gadot was “touched” by Robbie’s comments.
All that’s to say, Barbie is a massive success for Margot Robbie, a two-time Oscar nominee who, for some reason, ended up in a steady stream of flops between Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood and Barbie.
After the much-ballyhooed Amsterdam and Babylon, Robbie is finally the movie star many expected her to become. One doesn’t play Harley Quinn and Tarzan’s Jane in the same summer unless that person has some serious juice. Moreover, it’s quite a turnaround from last December when “the internet” decided she was “box office poison.”
Let that be a lesson to us all: When in our flop eras, a big-fat Barbie payday could be around the corner.