Culture news These 3 Hollywood directors are billionaires: Christopher Nolan and James Cameron are far from it
Obviously, when a director is behind one or more films that are a hit at the box office, he rightly fills his pockets. But then, who are the filmmakers who make the most money?
In your opinion: which Hollywood director has the biggest… fortune? James Cameron perhaps, to whom we owe three of the most profitable feature films in history (Avatar 1 & 2, Titanic)? After all, it makes sense to the extent that these films each generated more than two billion at the worldwide box office. Or would the richest filmmaker be Christopher Nolan, whose Oppenheimer hit captivated audiences around the world in 2023? Well, wrong, wrong! We give you the answer!
Peter Jackson well placed
It’s thanks to the ranking The World’s Celebrity Billionaires 2024 of Forbes, published last month, that we can enlighten you on the subject… In seventh position in this ranking – ahead of celebrities like Taylor Swift, LeBron James or Tiger Woods – we find a certain Peter Jackson, famous director of Lord of the rings and the Hobbit. The fortune of the 62-year-old filmmaker is now estimated at $1.5 billion ! A sum of which the majority does not come from his films, moreover. As Forbes recalls, in 2021, Jackson sold the “VFX Tech Division” of his post-production studio Weta Digital (he owned the majority) to the video game creation company Unity. Result of the operation: more than a billion dollars.
The Spielberg-Lucas duo at the top of the list
But, this is nothing compared to the fortune of Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones) and George Lucas (Star Wars). The fortune of the first is estimated at $4.8 billion… A jackpot achieved with the succession of several big hits at the box office as well as remuneration not in salary, but indexed to a percentage of the receipts of his films! Finally, Mister Lucas sits at the top of the Forbes list, with $5.5 billion. Once again, it is thanks to a financial transaction that he got here – when he sold his production company Lucas Film – and the exploitation of its flagship Star Wars license – to Disney, in 2012, for 4 billion of dollars.