History has shown that successful shows that become cultural phenomenons can bring a big payday for the cast. Seinfeld and Friends were notable TV shows that made its actors megastars by giving them A-list movie star-type salaries. Stranger Things has become its own monster, and the cast is about to cash in on its success with the upcoming fifth season. ScreenRant is now reporting on the revelation of the substantial pay bumps the kids of Hawkins will be receiving.
After the success of season 4, the actors were able to successfully negotiate pay raises for four tiers of their extensive cast:
“Tier 1 ($9.5 million): Winona Ryder and David Harbour, the adult stars of the series;
Tier 2 (just over $7 million): the four boys—Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, and Finn Wolfhard—plus Sadie Sink, who pleaded Max’s importance to the show and got added here;
Tier 3 (just over $6 million): the other main stars, including Joe Keery, Natalia Dyer, Maya Hawke, and Charlie Heaton; Tier 4 includes everybody else. Star Millie Bobby Brown gets paid for the series through a separate, and very lucrative, overall deal with Netflix.”
Season 4 of Stranger Things performed immensely well for the streaming service. The episodes were lengthened to feature-type runtimes as each entry clocked in at over 70 minutes, with the finale being a bona fide movie. The new salaries are big for the stars; however, TV has seen extravagant numbers for a cast of long-running series. For example, the cast of The Big Bang Theory started modestly; then they were able to secure over $20 million for season 12 of their show. Netflix, whose business tactics are often the subject of ridicule, put a cap on future negotiations on other shows by keeping the math as diluted by ten episodes.
This development puts Stranger Things above comparable big-budget television series like HBO’s megahit, Game of Thrones, which grants a pay of $500,000 per episode for its stars. Although, for a series like that, the budgets are geared toward a lot of production expenses for being a massive world-building show with period costuming.