Four X-Men films, and James McAvoy's steadiest pay cheque comes from a cheap Shyamalan thriller
Blockbusters make the headlines; cheap thrillers pay the bills. James McAvoy just explained Hollywood accounting better than any studio ever would.
James McAvoy has played Professor X in four X-Men films and led Wanted, a $340 million-plus action hit, opposite Angelina Jolie. The film that keeps paying him is neither. On the Happy Sad Confused podcast with Josh Horowitz, reported by The Hollywood Reporter on 16 October 2026, he named M. Night Shyamalan's Split as "the only one that really consistently pays me". And the money did not take years to trickle in.
"So, we were in profit. So our first residual check came at the end of the first weekend. It was bonkers."
— James McAvoy, on Happy Sad Confused
His back-of-an-envelope sums: the film "was made for like $6 million or something like that", say $30 million on marketing, and "in our first weekend, we made $40 [million]". The opening is spot on: Split debuted with $40 million in North America in January 2017. The budget is a bit generous to Shyamalan's thrift (Deadline put it at $9 million), but the argument survives a 50% correction. The film went on to gross $278.4 million worldwide.
How a $9 million film pays its star
The interesting number in Deadline's 2017 profitability breakdown is not the gross. It is $93 million in "participations and residuals", money paid out to talent once a film earns, which Deadline called "in keeping with the Blumhouse formula that pays in success to established talent like Shyamalan and McAvoy".
That formula is simple: a modest fee up front, a real share if the film works. On a film this cheap, "if" turns into "when" by Sunday night:
- Budget: $9 million (McAvoy's guess: $6 million)
- Opening weekend: $40 million in North America
- Worldwide gross: $278.4 million
- Paid out in participations and residuals: $93 million
At $9 million there is nowhere for the profit to hide. The cheque simply goes out.
The cheapest film on James McAvoy's CV is the only one that behaves like a pension.
Shyamalan kept the model going: he wrote, directed and financed Glass (2019) himself, on a $20 million budget, with McAvoy back as the Horde. McAvoy credits the director's discipline: "he made that film and Glass on incredibly modest budgets and was very focused", squeezing every hour of shooting time by "being incredibly well-prepared".
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Big films, small cheques
Wanted sits at the other end of the scale. Universal opened it in June 2008 to $51 million domestically, and it finished north of $340 million worldwide. McAvoy's verdict is that he doesn't "get too much money" from it.
"You've always got a good back end and there's some in your contract, you get back end here and back end there. I very rarely see anything from anything."
— James McAvoy, on Happy Sad Confused
The rest of the post is "the odd check for like a couple hundred quid" or "checks for like 25 cents", which, he said, cost more to post than they are worth.
This is Hollywood accounting in one podcast clip. A back end is a share of profit, and on a blockbuster, profit is whatever survives marketing, distribution fees, overheads and interest. The bigger the film, the longer that list, and the longer the film can sit "not yet in profit" on paper while it sells out cinemas. McAvoy didn't say Wanted officially lost money. He didn't have to: for the actor, a film that never reaches profit on paper and a flop pay exactly the same.
So the next time a franchise star turns up in a modest genre film, don't assume a crisis of artistic conscience. When McAvoy went back to Blumhouse for the Speak No Evil remake in 2024, it was not a Professor X slumming it in a horror film. It was a man who had read his post.
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