‘Forbes’ Can Smell What ‘The Rock Is Cooking’: Dwayne Johnson Listed As Highest Paid Actor Of All Time
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has come a long way since he was cut by the Canadian Football League in 1995 and headed home with only $7 in his wallet. So far, that he made Forbes annual celebrity rich list this year, earning a special distinction along the way. In the 20-year history of the list, Johnson has now achieved the highest total for actor earnings. From June of 2017 to June of 2018, Johnson has reportedly earned $124 million dollars, or about double what he earned last year when he was ranked second on the celebrity rich list.
His overall listing on the collection of the top 100 celebrity earners was fifth, which is up from ranking in 22nd place overall last year. Johnson was cited as having earned the vast majority of his annual income from his work on the movies Rampage and Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, according to Business Insider. He had big upfront payments and a piece of the profits on the back-end for his films and also pulled down a little extra coin for using his social media accounts to post about his movies and promote them. Add that to what he made for Ballers and it was a big year for Johnson.
Johnson was in good company at the top of the list with Floyd Mayweather raking in $285 million pre-tax earnings, and George Clooney coming in second with $239 million, mostly from the sale of his tequila company Casamigos. Kylie Jenner was third with $166.5 million in earnings, and Judge Judy Scheindlin came in fourth with $147 million in earnings, primarily from the $100 million sale of her video library.
"It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice," says Dwayne Johnson and his reasoning behind his successhttps://t.co/6l5YLNUIaQ pic.twitter.com/dOnjY0UVpK
— Forbes (@Forbes) July 13, 2018
Through it all, Johnson has continued to work hard and build himself into one of the most lucrative brands in entertainment at the age of 46. Skyscraper has hit theaters in the U.K. already, and Johnson has already completed filming on Fighting With My Family. He is currently working on Jungle Cruise, with Hobbs and Shaw, Jumanji 2, Red Notice, and Black Adam – all in pre-production. To boot, according to IMDB, he has four more big films that have been announced for 2020 and beyond that he is tied to.
Johnson has remained humble about how far he has come since his Canadian Football League days and took some time to acknowledge his position on the Forbes celebrity list on his Instagram.
The Rock took to Twitter to put out several messages to his fans after the list was revealed, with this message being among the most popular.
“True story, I heard this quote when I was 15 and thought ‘man if I’m ever important one day, I want to make it a point to be kind and nice.’ I don’t know if I’m ‘important’ these days, but I can tell you that being nice and kind to people is LITERALLY the easiest thing to do.”
