Margot Robbie’s millions: How the Australian actor and her husband became a producer power couple
Margot Robbie and her husband Tom Ackerley have been signing lucrative movie deals to grow their entertainment empire as a power couple.
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Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley are building an entertainment empire.
The new industry power couple have been penning lucrative deals, have 20 projects in development and earned the honour of Film Producers of the Year for 2020.
The loved-up pair, who married in 2016, signed to a partnership with Amazon Prime, which gives the giant a first look at their TV projects.
The deal with Amazon, which spent $9 billion on original content in 2020, was inked last month.
The financials have been kept secret, and Robbie’s representative declined to answer questions about the price Amazon paid.
But the agreement was crucial for the future of Robbie and Ackerley’s company LuckyChap, with the coronavirus pandemic threatening the existence of cinema.
Warner Bros. has revealed it will send its 2021 movie releases straight to digital, and Disney has prioritised its streaming service for new projects, which means that actor’s mega pay days may no longer be subsidised by box office sales.
But Robbie alone is worth at least $33 million.
LuckyChap turned the $14 million budget it had for the 2017 figure skating film I, Tonya — in which Robbie starred as Olympian Tonya Harding — into a $67 million box office success.
And her overall career box office takings were more than $3.3 billion, including the lucrative Suicide Squad franchise, The Wolf of Wall Street, Peter Rabbit, The Legend of Tarzan and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
The company already had a first look deal for its films with Warner Bros, which distributed her female-led, dark action thriller Birds of Prey, which was released last year.
Respected trade magazine The Hollywood Reporter gave LuckyChap the title of Film Producers of the Year for 2020.
LuckyChap, also includes Robbie’s childhood Australian friend Sophia Kerr and Brit Josey McNamara, who both lived with Robbie and Ackerley in a sharehouse in Clapham in south London.
Their next headline grabbing project is a picture about the fashion doll Barbie, with Robbie in the title role.
Anna Smith, a British critic who hosts the podcast Girls on Film, said Robbie, 30, and Ackerley, 31, would not make it a plastic story.
“What they are trying to do is put women’s stories front and centre – there is still a lot of inequality in our industry both in front and behind the camera,” she said.
“She is going to be in the Barbie movie but it’s not going to be the kind of movie that you would expect it to be.”
Smith said that the couple’s success was grounded because they met before they were world famous.
“Tom was a 3rd Assistant director when they met and they have come up in the industry together and they have formed a production company with their friends and with people who have the same values,” she said.
“They are becoming a bit of a power couple.”
Robbie, a Queenslander, cut her teeth on Neighbours.
Now she is based in Los Angeles, but spends time in London, and has been spotted recently at The Crooked Billet in Clapton, north London, with Paul Mescal, who starred in BBC hit Normal People.
Robbie also has her heart in the UK – she posted a picture of herself as Spice Girl Geri Halliwell in her famous British flag dress last year, which got 3.2 million likes from her 22 million Instagram followers.
LuckyChap has a swish office in LA, which was so posh it featured in an the Architectural Digest magazine.
Smith said that Robbie was following in the footsteps of Nicole Kidman, and could have a similar four-decade long career, either in front or behind the camera.
“They’re both very good actresses but Nicole has done slightly darker roles than Margot Robbie – she has tended to act in blockbuster movies and in that kind of sphere,” she said.
LuckyChap has 20 projects in development, and just released Dreamland, where Robbie plays a fugitive bank robber in Texas during the Great Depression.
They have also released Promising Young Woman, which was the first of the company’s movies not to star Robbie.
British actress Carey Mulligan, who starred in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, took the lead in the film about a woman who seeks revenge for a trauma in her childhood.
Robbie, Ackerley and McNamara were humbled with The Hollywood Reporter honour last month.
“We never started a company to be a starring vehicle for me or to be a platform for me to chase my dreams,” Robbie told the magazine in December.
“It was really that we wanted to expand what female stories and female storytellers could do in this industry, and I don’t need to be onscreen for that to happen.”
LuckyChap has signed director Greta Gerwig, who worked on Little Women, for Barbie, who will work with her partner Noah Baumbach on the script.
Robbie refused to release details, but said Barbie would be surprising.
“People immediately have an idea of, “Oh, Margot is playing Barbie, I know what that is,” but our goal is to be like, “Whatever you’re thinking, we’re going to give you something totally different — the thing you didn’t know you wanted,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.
Judy Wells, spokeswoman for the British Film Institute, said Robbie and Ackerley were taking control of their careers.
“They are a producer couple and it’s interesting to watch how they are supporting the industry,” she said.
“They are a really good example of screen actors taking control of what they are doing. It’s definitely something that we’re seeing as a trend.”
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