James McAvoy Says ‘Split’ Is The Only Film That ‘Really Consistently Pays Me’
The detail that gets me is the "couple 100 quid" checks. James McAvoy is sitting there, a man who fronted entire X-Men sagas, and the movie that keeps trickling money into his account is the one where he played a guy with 23 personalities and teeth-grinding rage.
It makes a strange kind of sense, though. Split was a runaway success on a budget Hollywood's accountants probably laughed at, and that kind of performance keeps generating revenue long after the posters come down. Blockbusters eat their budgets alive and then vanish into streaming library graveyards. A film like Split gets resold, licensed, dubbed and re-licensed to every corner of the planet, and each time a tiny sliver of the pie makes its way back to him.
I'd want to know how many years these checks keep arriving, and whether his other films just stopped paying entirely or simply pay so rarely they're forgettable. There's almost a Buddhist quality to it. The movie he made with no grand expectations ends up being the one that sustains him, while the calculated blockbusters fade into silence. Hollywood accounting has always been a house of mirrors, but this is the rare case where the reflection shows something honest about how we actually value stories.