Based on the budget alone, Netflix’s globetrotting heist thriller Red Notice is set to be the biggest original movie the streaming service has ever produced, with the project having been involved in a bidding war from almost the second it was announced. Indeed, Paramount, Sony, Legendary, Warner Bros. and Universal all bid for the rights, with the latter winning out in the end.
However, once the numbers started getting crunched and the budget crept past the $150 million mark, Universal got cold feet and sold Red Notice to Netflix. From the very beginning, though, writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber and his regular collaborator Dwayne Johnson have remained the two constants, and things only got more expensive when the action extravaganza cast the other major roles.
The world’s highest-paid actor was already locked in to star as an Interpol agent, but he then recruited his close friend Ryan Reynolds, the world’s second highest-paid Hollywood talent, to play an expert con artist. Gal Gadot, meanwhile, who had recently become one of the highest-paid actresses on the planet after securing a hefty payday for Wonder Woman 1984, signed on to play an art thief, presumably costing Netflix an absolute fortune in salaries.
In fact, insider Daniel Richtman is now claiming that Johnson fought for Gadot to get the same pay packet as the two male leads, which seems like exactly the sort of thing that somebody with his reputation would do. It was already reported that Reynolds and Gadot would pick up about $20 million each for their troubles, while The Rock would score a little bit extra seeing as he’s also producing through his Seven Bucks banner, but either way, the trio of megastars are walking away from Red Notice with their bank balances positively bulging.
