American Reunion: Which Stars Got Multi-Million-Dollar Deals, and Which Got Short-Changed?

Here's an interesting factoid: when the original "American Pie" script was being shopped around, it was submitted with the title "Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made For Under $10 Million That Your Reader Will Love But The Executive Will Hate." That title got it the attention that the writers wanted, probably mostly for the "Under $10 Million" part.

Now the franchise is on to the fourth movie (if you only count theatrical releases), titled "American Reunion," and not much has changed. Though the budget is bigger this time at about $50 million, that's still a pretty low dollar amount for a movie that is more or less guaranteed to be a hit.

Of course, to reach that number there had to be some cuts, and a lot of them came out of the actors' paychecks. As it turned out, some of the stars earned multi-million-dollar deals, while others (many of whom had equally large roles in the first two movies) earned millions less.

So, who got the big bucks, and who didn't? According to THR, Jason Biggs and Seann William Scott managed to wrangle $5 million deals out of the studio, plus box office bonuses. That's a step up from Alyson Hannigan and Eugene Levy who, like Biggs and Scott, were with the series for all three previous films but will only get $3 million for "Reunion."

Meanwhile, original "Pie" stars Thomas Ian Nicholas, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Shannon Elizabeth, Mena Suvari, Tara Reid and Chris Klein will all be earning somewhere between $500,000 and $750,000, less than 20% of what Biggs and Scott are pulling in.

I guess loyalty pays... although some of the discrepancy could be due to the fact that names like Scott and Hannigan have gone on to maintain fairly high profiles (Scott starred in movies like "Role Models" and Hannigan currently stars on "How I Met Your Mother"), while names like Suvari and Nicholas have gone quiet.