Surprising amount The Office actors make from show’s streaming rights after they were sold for $500 million

The Office may have been one of the most popular shows ever when it came out but lockdown and the popularity of streaming have sent its success to another level.

The year of worldwide COVID-19 induced lockdowns, 2020 saw The Office reign supreme as the most popular show in the world.

The show accrued 57 billion minutes watched on Netflix that year, over 17 billion minutes more than the next most successful.

Eventually, this led to Peacock, the streaming site in the US for NBC Universal, paying $500 million to exclusively host the show they technically own.

This was because the TV show’s own company was placed in a bidding war with Netflix, Hulu, Apple, and Amazon, to buy out the rights.

Whilst the massive deal is widely agreed to have made Ricky Gervais and other execs on the show very rich, many will wonder whether that has trickled down to Steve Carell and the rest of the American cast.

The US Office is a massive success that continues to profit for its creators (NBC)

The Office cast still get residuals from the show 12 years on

The cast of The Office gets residuals, as many actors of successful shows do, based on when the series is shown on TV.

As anyone who has ever stuck on Sky Comedy or Comedy Central will tell you, this is very, very often.

Reruns give actors a pre-agreed percentage of their original salary; the higher the original salary, the higher the residual cheques they get.

Steve Carell is reported to have received about $300,000 an episode by the end of his seven-season run on the show so his residuals were likely quite sizeable.

Unfortunately though, residuals reduce with each time they are shown, making them generally less and less valuable.

The show was sold in a $500,000,000 deal (NBC)

If the Office cast got a percentage of the massive streaming deal, it wouldn’t have broken the bank

Residuals for streaming work differently as they are not paid out per play but are generally paid as a lump sum when the deals are made.

Figuring out the amount owed from this is an incredibly complicated process and is affected by your original salary, how long it is since the show aired, and how many subscribers the platform has.

One actor took to YouTube to make an estimate of how much stars of The Office likely made from the $500 million deal.

E-Kan Soong, a working actor in Hollywood of 10+ years, worked out the rough amount based on someone who was hired as a series regular or day to day contract on the show.

They said this would likely lead to roughly $445 a year for a day-to-day contract or $1335 a year for a series regular.

This is, of course, before any fees that must be paid to managers or agents and, considering a series regular would in this scenario be being paid 0.000267 percent of the overall deal.

Pam and Angela run a rewatch podcast (NBC)

The Office actors get residuals, but claim they got nothing from its success on streaming

Angela Kinsey and Jenna Fischer, who run The Office rewatch podcast Office Ladies, have hit out at the idea that they make millions from residuals.

Jenna Fischer, who played Pam, said in episode 226 of the show: “We do not receive residuals on Peacock or Netflix or any of the streamers. We never have. And that is because all of our contracts predated streaming.

"It literally did not exist. There was no language in our unions or in our contracts for how we would be compensated for it."

Fischer went on to say that Kinsey appearing in the show's 'webisodes', which won multiple awards, did not earn her any residuals at all.

Her on-screen fiancé David Denman, who played Roy, spoke out about this in the recent SAG-Aftra strikes.

Denman, who appeared on the picket lines last year, said in an interview with AP: “Netflix, they created a model that everyone else followed, which is, 'We're gonna buy you out, we're gonna pay for your services for a cycle, which could be three months’.

“It doesn't matter if you watch that show once or you watch it 100 times, you're not gonna get any more money because more people watch it. The only person that makes more money is the person who licensed that to Netflix… that doesn't trickle down to a blue-collar actor like me.”

Actors on the show have found other ways to make money off it, however, with Kevin actor Brian Baumgartner earning over £750,000 a year on Cameo.