Dinosaur days

Naomi Watts is Australia’s highest paid actor ... but the Wiggles and Global Creatures have nudged her into third place on the entertainers’ list.

Global Creatures has again stomped its way to the top of BRW’s top entertainers list for 2011 with its big arena performances of Walking with Dinosaurs. Rich entertainers list veterans the Wiggles have come in second, while actor Naomi Watts’s series of lucrative movie roles put her in third place, making her Australia’s highest paid actor.

However, the big success stories on this year’s list are veteran promoters Michael Gudinski, Michael Coppel, Michael Chugg and Paul Dainty, who have been on the list since it first appeared 15 years ago, and some of the newer funsters following in their wake on the success of a series of contemporary music festivals. With a mixture of concert tours, music festivals, musical theatre, dancing and wrestling on their books, the guys and girls behind the scene chalked up gross earnings of $85.5 million in 2011, up 60 per cent from $53.6 million the year before.

Click here to see the top 10 on BRW TV

Television and film actors made $121 million in combined earnings on the 2011 list and the category boasts two debutantes, Adelaide Clemens and Rachael Taylor, whose earnings of $2.4 million might go some way to shoring up what’s otherwise been a tough year.Entertainers iFrame

It’s not all good news, however, as film, stage and music stars have felt the impact of the downturn and total earnings for the Top 50 Entertainers list are down by 29 per cent to $409.7 million from last year, when they reached a high of $579.5 million.

Dinosaurs of another kind, rockers AC/DC, experienced a drop in earnings drop to $9 million from $131.4 million last year as a result of completing their world tour, relying solely on earnings from their latest album and sales of back catalogue albums.

Although it was a big drop, 93 per cent, their earnings purely from album sales are more than many bands and musicians make from touring and album sales combined and in fact only Kylie Minogue ranked ahead of AC/DC on this year’s list.

While the always controversial Kyle Sandilands has managed to increase his earnings over the past 12 months to $3 million from $2.5 million last year, bumping him and co-star Jackie O four spots up the list to number 37, although a series of advertising boycotts may cut their earnings over the next 12 months.

Top 5 Entertainers

For full coverage see the BRW Rich Summer Edition - Thursday 15th of December.

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