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Johnny Depp named most overpaid actor. Will Hollywood finally stop hiring him?

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As we've seen time and time again, a dude's ugly history of violence against women doesn't mean a thing in the boy's club that is Hollywood.

But money, on the other hand, talks.

For the second year straight, Johnny Depp has topped Forbes' list of the 'Most Overpaid Actors In Hollywood', triumphing over the likes of Will Smith, Will Ferrell, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Adam Sandler and, blasphemously, Channing Tatum.  

According to the magazine, which looked at the stars' last three blockbusters released before June 2016 and analysed the amount each picture made at the box office compared to the salaries paid, Depp brought in just $2.80 for every $1 he was paid.

For red-faced studio execs, who sit around in their offices slamming phones while dollar signs spin in their eye sockets and steam spurts out their ears (I imagine), the news should be a wake-up call: no one wants to see Johnny Depp in your movie anymore, so stop hiring him already.

Like many of us, I was a JD fanboy for a while. He had cheekbones, guitar chops, and mumbled uncomfortably during interviews. He was Edward Scissorhands, Cry-Baby. As a teenage film nerd, I even owned Jonathan Rosenbaum's BFI guide to Dead Man, a wanky deep-dive into all the William Blake references Depp made in Jim Jarmusch's 1996 neo-Western.

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But the guy's been phoning it in for years, in box office bombs and tedious sequels like Alice Through The Looking Glass. I mean, who reads the script for Mortdecai and goes, "Yes, I'm in!"? Or gets a call from their agent going, "Hey, they're shooting Pirates Of The Caribbean Part 11, you interested?", and just shrugs and goes "Okay."? My nickname is 'Lazy Pants', but I can't condone that.

It seems ridiculously off-topic to be quibbling over Depp's lame roles in the wake of the assault accusations by his ex-partner, actress Amber Heard, this year, who detailed the way he repeatedly hit her and threw a mobile phone at her head, leaving cuts and bruises across her eyes and cheek.

But the movie industry has never cared about those kinds of things, as last week's revelations over Bertolucci and Brando's on-set assault in Last Tango In Paris once again showed. Depp's already slated for nine roles through 2018, including a part as Dominique Strauss-Kahn – the former IMF director involved in a sexual abuse scandal in 2011 - in an upcoming film from James Packer's mate and collaborator, Brett Ratner.  

If the backlash over Depp's casting in J.K. Rowling's latest Harry Potter-verse film franchise, Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, wasn't enough to convince Hollywood execs that Depp is untouchable, then maybe dollar signs will.

Give his roles to Richard Grieco or something, that guy's due for a comeback.

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