SRK, Akshay, Salman, Amitabh in Forbes list of highest paid actors

Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan and Amitabh Bachchan have made it to the list of Forbes highest paid actors in the world. Only yesterday, Deepika was declared in the list featuring top ten paid celebrities on the planet.

Second Bollywood actor to feature in the list is Akshay Kumar who is at the tenth position. Interestingly, Shah Rukh did not feature in this illustrious list past year, but managed to make a memorable comeback not only by grabbing the 8th spot, but also defeating his contemporaries including Akshay Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, and Salman Khan.

This year has seen the resurgence of Akshay Kumar at the box office with the hat-trick of Rs 100 crores hits and saw a rare roadblock in the career of Shah Rukh Khan with a disappointment in Fan, which couldn’t even reach Rs 100 crores.

About Salman Khan, who delivered the biggest hit of the year, “Sultan“, the magazine wrote, “One of Bollywood’s leading men, Khan makes top rupee from movies such as Bajrangi Bhaijaan and numerous endorsements”.

Shah Rukh Khan banked as much as Downey Jr., while Akshay Kumar ($31.5 million) earned the same as Brad Pitt in our scoring period.

Meanwhile, newly divorced actor Johnny Depp landed on the fifth spot with a US$48 million pre-tax earning from the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” installment and the box office movie “Alice through the Looking Glass”. She was the only Indian actress and the sole newcomer in the list, coming in on the 10th spot.

The pay disparity between men and women in films is on full display after the release of Forbes’s annual best-paid actors and actress lists. “The action star bolsters his earnings endorsing a wider range of products than most Hollywood shills”, Forbes said.

Jackie Chan is at number 2 with total earnings of $61 million. “In May 2015 he was sentenced to five years in prison for a 2002 hit-and-run vehicle incident which killed a homeless man; his sentence was suspended”, wrote Forbes. He preceded by big Hollywood actors such as Dwayne Johnson who tops the list and others including Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise etc. Earlier this week the magazine named Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence the world’s highest paid actress for a second straight year, with an estimated 2016 take of $46 million.