Today in marketable skills...

Hang on hang on hang on. Look, I don't have any particular beef with Mark Wahlberg but-huh? Oh, well I don't have any beef with him as an actor, there was that incident. Anyway, I mention my Wahlberg-neutral stance, because I don't think he's the best actor in the world.

I'm not even convinced he's the best actor in this scene...

Marky Mark, seen here with the
Funky Bunch made $68 million for acting.
Let that sink in. $68 million. Of money.

He is however the highest-paid actor in the world having made $68 million last year according to Forbes' list of baffling priorities in the film industry. Yeah, $68 million. With an 'm' which, while not a 'b' is still a ridiculous shit-load of money. And this absurd sum is, in part, thanks to his work on Transformers: The Last Knight, and while I didn't see it is almost certainly objective garbage going by the quality of the last twelve or thirteen entires in the series. Wahlberg also narrowly beat out Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson at $65 million.

But what I want to know is what kind of a world do we live in where three million dollars is a narrow gap? And furthermore, what kind of world is it where a rapper and a wrestler are the top two highest paid actors in the world? Shouldn't they be off rapping and wrestling respectively?

Oh, right, it's exactly this world.

Pffft...doctors...they just cut people open
and perform complicated surgical procedures.

So again, nothing against these actors as people, but are they paid so much because they can act or because they're Mark Wahlberg and Dwane Johnson? Like professional football players, some of whom make two Wahlbergs a year, they presumably have a quality that's sufficiently rare as to warrant crazy town amounts of money but is that quality acting or is it being famous? I guess what I'm getting at is, is this a list of the highest paid actors or the highest paid famous people who repeat words other people wrote while someone else films them? I don't know, am I making a valid point or just describing what film actors do?

Maybe I'm just being a snob (definitely), here sniping from the box about things I know nothing about and could never do myself. And of course, this isn't a list of the most talented actors, it's a list of the highest paid actors, but it just seems like acting ability should factor in a bit more. Like, say, at all.

Pictured: Basically me. Huh? Which one?
I don't know, probably Waldorf? 

While technically a subjective question,
the answer is objectively no, in no way.

And let's not even talk about the gender pay-gap. Wait, no, let's totally talk about the gender pay-gap, because that's even more disheartening. Emma Stone is the highest paid woman on the list at #15 with $26 million last year. For perspective, which clearly is not something anyone involved in making movies is interested in anymore, Adam Sandler, #4 on the list, made nearly double that with $50.5 million. Now you have to ask yourself, is Adam Sandler's acting ability, at any point in his career, worth twice that of Emma Stone?

Above: basically a unicorn.

According to Forbes, the disparity is because superhero movies were big last year and those tend to be sausage fests and as a result there just weren't very many roles for women, but of the top ten I think only Robert Downey Jr. and Vin Diesel were in superhero movies last year so...bullshit? I'll agree that there's totally not enough roles for women, but suggesting that America's love of formulaic, CGI-heavy, mindless, explode-a-thons is the reason women have been getting short changed seems disingenuous.

Anyway, regardless of my assessment of Adam Sandler's talent as an actor and where I think the blame for pay-disparity really lies, $68 million seems like too much money to hand any one person who's only unique skill is being Mark Wahlberg.

Don't look at me like that. You get paid millions of dollars to
co-star with Optimus goddamn Prime. I do not feel sorry for you.