What would it take to get you to leave your honeymoon early? What if you were honeymooning on a private island one of the most beautiful women in the world? What if you had already shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent the island and payoff locals to leave you alone for a week? Is there any amount of money that could take you away from this heavenly scenario? Apparently the answer is yes. There is an amount of money. A very large amount of money.
This is the exact dilemma that Brad Pitt recently faced while he was honeymooning with Angelina Jolie on a private island in the Mediterranean. So what did it take to get Brad to leave Angie on a beach by herself? $13 million. Did Brad have to jet off to film a movie for six months to earn that $13 million paycheck? Nope. All he had to do was fly to Macau for roughly 48 hours. And he wasn't the only A-lister taking home a massive paycheck for two days of work.
Recently it was revealed that Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro were each paid $13 million to film a commercial for a Hollywood-themed casino called "Studio City" that is set to open sometime this year in Macau.
And when you've got that kind of star power for your commercial, you can't just hire some no-name director off the street. You gotta bring out the big directing guns. So who'd this casino call? Martin Scorsese. They also hired Martin's good buddy Terence Winter to write the commercial which will ultimately be more of a mini movie called "The Audition". In case you aren't familiar with Terence, he's the Academy Award nominated writer of The Wolf of Wall Street and executive producer behind the TV shows Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos.
In total, the casino reportedly shelled out $70 million to film what is now by far the most expensive commercial of all time. How can the casino afford this price tag? Well, it helps that the owners are Lawrence Ho and James Packer, who are worth $2.4 billion and $6.4 billion, respectively. $70 million is actually a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated $2.3 billion that will have been spent to construct the casino by the time it opens.