[lz_third_party includes=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr_nGAbFkmk”]

 “The Expendables” brought Stallone’s chief action rivals of the 80s and 90s — Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis — together with him for the first time, achieving a sense of wish fulfillment for action fans who had been calling for such a collaboration for the past two decades.  There is no way that those three stars could come together feasibly while earning their normal salaries (and Schwarzenegger had promised to forego acting while serving as governor), so they worked out a plan to just appear minimally onscreen together and shoot for a day.

But in the first “Expendables” sequel in 2012, Willis and Schwarzenegger played bigger parts in the film, including a hilarious scene in which they were crammed together in a tiny smart car careening through the inside of an airport while shooting at bad guys. They each showed up for three days and got paid a cool $1 million per day. But Willis walked away from his part in “Expendables 3,” because the producers would “only” pay him $3 million for a whopping four days of work.

Harrison Ford replaced him in the cast, playing a different character, while Willis moved on to make a string of dreadful direct-to-video movies in which he still commands $1 million per day as the only recognizable face — and usually only appears onscreen for about 10 minutes per film. In a 2015 movie called “Vice,” his performance was so uninspired that one reviewer wondered if he was comatose until the plot “twist” that revealed he was a cold, unthinking robot.   

Which brings us back to Roberts, whose “Valentine’s Day” was the romantic-comedy equivalent of “The Expendables,” featuring a cast of 18 movie and TV stars who each phoned in their performances over a couple days on set while bagging a couple million dollars apiece. Roberts earned $3 million for six minutes of screen time, Variety reported, topping even Willis’ ability to pull in money for virtually no work at all.

What this all reflects is that even in these economically unstable times, movie stars are still able to make vast sums of money for minimal effort – and often, despite having a string of flops. Forbes has also singled out Johnny Depp, Denzel Washington, Will Ferrell, and Will Smith as repeat overpaid offenders at the box office, while Chris Evans — who portrays Captain America in the current Marvel Comics movies — is currently Hollywood’s best bet in terms of how much his movies gross in relation to his salary.

For now, with “Money Monster” drawing solid reviews from critics, Roberts might finally have a hit on her hands. But even if “Monster” proves to be just another flop, she’s definitely set for life.