No Stupid Questions

Because mass media technology duplicates their work millions and millions of times over. If you think about how many end consumers get the product of their work, it will make more sense.

One reason entertainers actually manage to take home a sizable piece of this enormous pie is that they have strong unions. Important not to forget that. Because millions of wannabes would love to take Bakula’s place for nothing more than a living wage. The way they keep that from happening is good old fashioned labor solidarity and smart bargaining at every level of cast and production. I wish the entire economy were unionized as well as entertainment is. The world would be quite different.

The people in the arts who make lots of money are the exception, not the rule.

Products that scale indefinitely to the masses earn indefinitely scaled pay as well. What's far grosser is what the studios and their greedy CEOs earn off the backs of production staff who aren't paid on the same model and are treated like props with no job security.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Zaslav

Here's what it comes down to: negotiations based on how much money the industry makes from their work. Because without the artist, comedian, etc., their profits vanish.

Now understand that every worker in the world could realise the same thing. That's what unions are for, having that weight to give the employees of a company leverage and ask for a bit more of the pie that wouldn't exist without their work. Why do you think businesses fight unions so damn hard? Because it's easier to distract or scare enough of a worker group, mostly compared to a single artist.

Most are not.

Being an influencer(or entertainer whatever) is like playing an incremental game. If you have 10 million fans and everyone pays you $1 you have 10 million dollars. The money is not about the art, it’s about how many people they can reach.

For every one making millions, there are millions making near nothing.

People at the top of every industry DO make that much. Think about the UHC guy, you don't think he was pulling that much?

Inequality is baked in.

Because the people paying them think they're going to earn it back.

When you are a well-known or household name, your presence alone can convince a lot of people to watch whatever product you're in. Not just that, entertainment is inherently a risky business. Replacing unknowns with celebrities means reducing that risk, replacing it with known factors.

In other words, because the market thinks they're worth it.

Firstly it's a fraction of a percent of the pool of people working as entertainers that get paid anything close to a comfortable salary—many don't even last a few years and make basically nothing before they change careers.

The successful ones get paid a load basically because the people that invest in funding TV shows & films know that you can generally multiply your investment by attaching a household name to the project. Now this is for several reasons, firstly a household name will generally actually be a good actor. Secondly, people recognising a member of your cast means they're generally more likely to watch it. Finally, there's the effect on the rest of the casting—some studios might take the opportunity to push the compensation of the "no-name" actors down because they have an opportunity to work with a star, others might go the other way and use the first star in negotiations to get additional starts signed on to the project.

So essentially, the big projects make a lot of money, and executives attribute a significant part of that generated value to having the big star involved, and so they portion the funding to ensure that happens.

There's also the negotiation factor on long running shows, main characters end up in good negotiation positions for more money if a show is successful and their character isn't easy to kill off. This is also why Netflix tries to cancel stuff before the 3rd season—that's about the point who holds the power in negotiations shifts away from the studio.

An in-demand actor is a finite resource, they can only really work on one or two projects at any given time, so this also pushes their fees up as projects may end up in bidding wars. Conversely most entertainment costs very little to sell beyond the initial production costs, so after that's broken even it's free profit they can use for these fees.

Tl;dr capitalism

1. The entertainment industry is not known to it's job security, the earnings need to cover downtime as well.
2. Agents, artists have agents who get them their jobs, from what I understand they are often paid a percentage of the fee that the artist charge, so not all money goes to the artists pocket. The agent also knows the industry and how much an artist is worth to the productions, if a movie has a famous actor, it can be a huge draw and vastly increase earnings, since the actor is a draw, they should be compensated well.
3. When an artist gets well known in the industry, they have many more opportunities, so productions need to pay more to get the artist they want, this means booking a schedule way ahead in the future, blocking that time off from other projects.
4. It can be VERY physically demanding to change their appearance from role to role, one role might require the actor to play an overweight character and shortly after that production wraps they may need to play a character in near physical prime.

Note that I am not an actor or artist, I am an IT guy who has little inside knowledge, though this should be a reasonable explanation of what is going on

Regime whores keep plebs docile and there is a lot of value in that alone...

Plus mass media makes possible to generate revenue so regime whores know they can demand higher wage.

Why do you think john cena and NBA love China?

Popularity is currency, if someone presence in a production will bring more eyeballs or prestige then it has value.

The same reason a small YouTuber makes less then a huge YouTuber when doing a ad read

I wonder the same thing about pro sportsmen...

People watch them.

While I'm not here to justify the enormous amount of money they're paid, much much more than "essential" workers that been shoved down our throats that actually make the country run.

You have to factor in numerous things. These people travel a lot and obviously that can rack up in a short period of time. Furthermore, their homes are obviously pricier to maintain especially if in multiple locations, far more costly than the average apartment rent. There's also a number of things that they have to contribute and usually they don't have a safety net because their money is finite.

But of course that depends on the actor/actress and if there's a big demand for them, that's a huge thing in the entertainment industry. These are jobs that do not promise you that you'll be earning money as compared to a retail job on a consistent and set schedule basis. You need to be marketable. You need to have the right qualities. You need to actually be variable i.e do many roles and do them well. The line is very narrow when it comes to entertainment.

Now things like why bad actors/actresses get top billing anyways or why some actors/actresses are paid far more than everyone else, it comes down to favorability and ass-kissing I guess.