Kevin Smith has claimed that Harvey Weinstein purposely hurt Robin Williams’ pay with the theatrical release of Good Will Hunting. Smith had a relationship with Good Will Hunting scholars, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, from his past film, Chasing Amy, and is attributed with drawing the content out into the open. The film was disseminated by Miramax, of which Weinstein is the fellow benefactor.
As detailed by ET Canada, in his new book, Kevin Smith’s Secret Stash, Smith claims that Weinstein and Miramax deliberately pulled the film from theaters early so Williams would get less pay. Smith says Williams marked a deal that said if the film were to net more than $100 million in film industry sales, the actor would get a larger piece of the film’s total gross. This means that once it hit that mark, Williams would divide benefits with Miramax. The film finished its initial end of the week with a gross of $272,912 in film industry sales. In spite of the deal, Weinstein didn’t appear expectation on keeping up any part of it. Smith believes the goal of Weinstein and his creation company was to maximize their own benefits and hold Williams back from dividing the benefits. Good Will Hunting climbed the movies charts steadily until the finish of February 1998 when Miramax began pulling it from theaters. To add validity to Smith’s claims, the’s film industry sales neared $90 million around that time. Smith believes covetousness was their main motivator and expands in his full statement below:
“I remember when ‘Good Will Hunting’ was leaving theaters and it felt bizarre because it resembled, ‘Wait? There’s all this Oscar buzz, so for what reason would you pull it in case it was simply making cash?'” he wrote in the new book. “And they did this is because keeping it in theaters meant that a greater amount of the cash would go to Robin, whereas the second it went to video the split wasn’t Robin-heavy.”
While Smith figures Weinstein and Miramax may have sabotaged Williams’ earnings from Good Will Hunting, it did little to hurt the gathering of his performance. Good Will Hunting is regularly refered to as probably Williams’ best performance. In addition to amazingly sure critical gathering, audiences were also moved by the science between Williams and Damon as well as the really veritable way wherein Williams played out the job.