Jean-Claude Van Damme Made a Miscalculation
Belgian-born martial arts star Jean-Claude Van Damme isn’t as in-demand as he once was, and there are a few good reasons why. Mainly, he made a bad career move after his successful movie Timecop. He was offered to star in a trilogy that would earn him a huge $12 million per movie but he turned it down in hopes to negotiate a much larger sum.
Actor Jim Carrey had recently been in the papers for becoming the first actor to receive $20 million for a movie role. Jean-Claude demanded the studio pay him the same whopping figure for each film of the trilogy, and they simply turned him down. Years later he admitted: “Jim Carrey was being paid a fortune. And I wanted to play with the system. Like an idiot. Ridiculous.” From then on, he was blacklisted in Hollywood.