After his breakthrough with ‘Bloodsport’, Jean-Claude Van Damme became one of the big action stars of the late ’80s and early ’90s. But the 63-year-old never quite achieved the fame of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, both of whom could at one point gross up to $30 million per film. And the Belgian karate hero also lagged behind other stars: a fee of 8 million dollars for “Street Fighter – The Decisive Battle” remained the financial highlight for Van Damme…
…for which he is to some extent to blame: Because The actor let himself get away with a whopping $36 million because he slightly overestimated his star power!
Jean-Claude Van Damme was jealous of Jim Carrey
‘Street Fighter’ was a box office success and a year later ‘Timecop’ became the first Van Damme vehicle to break the $100 million mark. For this reason, the ‘Sudden Death’ star felt that his work should be worth at least as much as that of his colleague Jim Carreywho was one of the biggest and highest-paid stars in the industry in the mid-1990s thanks to comedy hits like “Ace Ventura” and “The Mask.”
In an episode of the British reality show ‘Jean-Claude Van Damme: Behind Closed Doors’, Van Damme talked about how he once lost a great opportunity (via ). After the successes of ‘Street Fighter’ and ‘Timecop’, he was promised significantly higher wages for subsequent film projects – but this was still too low for the actor: “I got a huge offer for a three-picture deal and it was $12 million per film,” Van Damme said. “I said, ‘I want $20 million like Jim Carrey,’ and they hung up.”
The later opponent of “The Expendables” justified his high standards as follows: “I made one film after another, and in between the films I made advertisements. I was tired. Everything I touched made money. Jim Carrey was getting paid a fortune, so I wanted to game the system a little bit. It wasn’t primarily about the money.”
The flops in Van Damme’s career were already piling up in the late 1990s, and in the following decade hardly any films starring the ‘Universal Soldier’ star hit the big screen. Even today he can still mainly be seen in direct-to-video productions. With one deal he could have won three times twelve million dollars, a total of $36 million.