Do Actors Get Paid Too Much?

I recently wrote a paper for my English class on weather or not actors get paid too much. For this paper I had to do a lot of research on how much different types of actors get paid, how much shows gross compared to movies, and what other people thought about this subject. When trying to find out what other people thought about this topic I came across a lot of blogs, all of witch were stating that they thought actors get paid way too much. I am assuming that the authors of these blogs are referring to the A-list actors who make millions of dollars per movie considering most actors make very little and usually have to have a second job. It was interesting to me that every article or blog I came across all had the same idea that actors get paid too much. This is interesting to me because I have a very different idea, I believe actors do not get paid too much and in fact most actors should be paid more.
In my research I found wages for most every type of actor, A-list, secondary, Broadway, off Broadway, television shows, commercial actors, and the actor who plays the second guy on the left. For me it is hard to understand how people can say that actors get paid too much when there are so many different types of actors with such a huge range in pay. Although none of these blogs I came across specified which type of actor they were talking about I assumed they were referring to the A-list actors considering they are the actors who make the most money. So I decided to find out how much A- list actor made for a movie, and how much that movies total income was and from this find out exactly what percentage the actor in that movie made of the total profits. For this little experiment I used Ewan Macgregor in Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith. I used this movie because in a blog I came across during my research the author had used this movie as an example of how Ewan Macgregor made way too much money for this movie with the $7 million he got for it. So I did the calculations and with the $7 million dollars Ewan Macgregor got he made 0.95% of the movies total profit. In my mind A-list actors get paid millions because the movies they star in make multi millions if not billions. If you look at it as Ewan Macgregor made 0.95% of the total profit of the movie he starred in, the $7 million doesn’t really seem like that much.
Another topic I came across a lot when reading these blogs was that an actor’s work isn’t hard; they don’t work enough for how much they are paid. Well being an actor myself and taking the university acting classes, I have learned what work goes into acting. When getting a role the actor must first read the script and do a script analysis, then do a character analysis, followed by a scene analysis for each scene they are in. After all of the analysis are done they must go through there lines and find their beat changes, then their intentions for each beat, next write in their subtext for each line they speak, and the inner-monologue for every line spoken to them. This is just the written work. Then of course there are all the rehearsals where they learn their blocking and run each scene hundreds of times until it is perfect. There is quite a lot of work that goes into acting and it takes months to put together a show or a movie. Because of all of this, work is another reason why I say actors get paid what they deserve.
One last thing to consider is what about the actors who are not A-list actors. When doing my research for this past paper I found many articles on actors protesting for higher wages. These articles I found were for Broadway actors, commercial actors, and supporting actors all fighting for their producers to give them a bigger cut of the profit. It is the producer who makes most of the money not the actors; in most shows the producer makes 30% to 50% of the profits while the actor makes 10% to 15%. It is for these actors that SAG (Screen Actors Guild) was created. These actors work very hard for little amounts or money. So I feel this argument shouldn’t be actors get paid too much, but lesser known actors should be paid more.