The actress produced the hit movie with her husband, Tom Ackerley
Margot Robbie, as Barbie, is making a huge amount of money.
Variety reports, citing multiple sources, that the 33-year-old “Barbie” star, who also acted as a producer on the movie, is projected to earn $50 million in a deal that combines her salary and box office bonuses. Tom Ackerley, her husband, is also a producer on the movie.
Representatives for Warner Bros. and Robbie did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the “Barbie” movie earned more than $1 billion at the worldwide box office, making Greta Gerwig the highest-earning female director of a live-action film. She overtook the 2019 Captain Marvel movie, co-directed by Anna Boden.
Through her company LuckyChap Entertainment, Robbie created “Barbie,” as well as the Oscar-winning “A Promising Young Woman” and “Birds of Prey.”
She personally chose Greta Gerwig to direct the movie and collaborated on the script with Gerwig’s real-life partner Noah Baumbach. Robbie initially wanted Barbie to be played by Gal Gadot, but Gerwig talked her into accepting the role.
“I never wanted to play Barbie and had no such fantasies about being Barbie. This is going to sound ridiculous, but honestly, I didn’t really think about the role of Barbie until years into the project,” Robbie admitted in an interview with Vogue in May.
Robbie told Collider that she envisioned “Barbie” as a movie with $1 billion potential before the film even reached its box office milestone, which came just over two weeks after its debut.
“I think I talked at the greenlight meeting about how studios achieve great prosperity when they are bold enough to pair a big idea with a visionary director,” she told the publication.
She cited the 1993 movie “Jurassic Park,” which launched an entire franchise, as an example, “naming all the things that were incredible and made the studios tons of money over the years.”
“And I said: “And now you have Barbie and Greta Gerwig”. And I think I told them it was going to bring in a billion dollars, which I may have exaggerated, but we needed to make a movie, OK?” – she joked in an interview, after which the movie delivered on that promise.
This summer, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour historical drama “Oppenheimer” and the Internet movement known as “Barbenheimer” challenged fans to attend both films, resulting in Barbie’s revival of the movie theater industry. Both films, which debuted in theaters on the same weekend, broke attendance records.
The Barbie movie is now in theaters.
