Voice-Overs Now Earn Mega-Bucks For Celebrity Vocal Actors

In recent years, this previously unglamorous role has become extraordinarily profitable for those stars lucky enough to land the right cartoon to do a voice-over for. How does $25m for a few days in a recording booth sound? And you don’t even have to learn your lines.

Buzz (Tim Allen) and Woody (Tom Hanks) | Disney

Well, spectacularly good if you are Tom Hanks or Tim Allen, who were reportedly able to command that sum (each!) for their vocal performances in Toy Story 5, out on 19 June, and one of the most anticipated films of the summer. These payments are a whopping 500 times their $50,000 compensation for the 1995 original. But can you imagine the backlash if either of their beloved characters, Woody (Hanks) or Buzz (Allen), were recast? So, Pixar/Disney doesn't really have a choice, except to splash out mega-bucks to this vocal duo.

However, you may be surprised to learn, their mega-bucks payment is not even the record. Far from it. The voices of Elsa and Anna in Frozen enjoy that lucrative distinction. It was reported that Idina Menzel and Kirsten Bell struck a $60m deal with Disney - again, each - to play the princess siblings in the forthcoming Frozen 3 and Frozen 4. Josh Gad, who voices Olaf the snowman, was supposedly paid the same. The trio, while famous, are hardly Hollywood icons. But, hey, if you land the right gig, the sky appears to be the limit.

For decades, studios preferred their voice actors to remain anonymous, primarily because actors were considerably cheaper when nobody knew who they were. But the actor who made the field fashionable for A-listers was Robin Williams. He played the Genie in Disney’s 1992 adaptation of Aladdin, and was paid a mere $75,000, but his performance was so unmistakably him - a motormouthed barrage of impersonations and one-liners - that it proved that a star’s established live-action persona could also be captured in ink and, later, CGI. That changed everything.

Suddenly, great animation was no longer seen as merely for children, which meant blockbuster levels of success were suddenly within reach. A gold rush ensued. Hanks and Allen were brought in to Toy Story, and Matthew Broderick, Jeremy Irons, Rowan Atkinson, Whoopi Goldberg and James Earl Jones to Disney’s first post-Aladdin project, The Lion King. (For playing Mufasa, Jones earned a reported $1m: a significant multiple of the $7,000 he received for providing the voice of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars.)

And let's not forget Dwayne Johnson. In 2016 he trousered $21m for Moana and almost double that for its 2024 sequel. Meanwhile, Hanks and Allen’s agents are surely already daydreaming of breaking those pesky Frozen records on Toy Story 6.

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