Now that we’re in 2021, we can see just how their pockets were affected, or not. In a word, CEOs were all still more than handsomely compensated for their work last year. For most, the pay cuts only meant they weren’t taking their salaries, which is a small fraction of their full compensation packages, mostly made up of stock and option awards, as well as bonuses.
While it is true that the top executives over at Fox, Comcast and Disney did make less money compared to 2019, others actually saw their pay increase despite lower salary. AMC’s Adam Aron and Cinemark’s Mark Zoradi each saw their total compensation jump in 2020 — which doesn’t look great when you consider that 2020 was a brutal year for the movie theater industry, taking billions in losses. Aron was gifted with a $3.75 million bonus for “extraordinary efforts” for steering the chain through the pandemic (this came at the same time AMC said it took a $1 billion loss during the last three months of 2020.
Zoradi’s stock awards nearly doubled during 2020, which more than made up for his salary being cut from $1 million to $740,000.
Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen saw his compensation go up 40-fold, from $2.36 million in 2019 to $94.7 million. The massive rise was due to an option award worth a whopping $91.9 million. If you take that out, his pay would still have been an 18.6% improvement from 2019, with $2.8 million.
Below is TheWrap‘s list of executive compensation details from 2020 corporate SEC filings. To compare it to past years, click through our previous annual reports. (You’re welcome):
2019 | 2018 | 2017 |2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008
We will be updating this story as more major media companies report the take-home pay of their top executives.
Bob Bakish is among the media execs who made more money in 2020 than he did in 2019. If we’re being fair, with the long-promised rebranding of CBS All Access to Paramount+, he didn’t mail it in from his dining room table. Then again, 2019 wasn’t exactly a put-your-feet-up year for Bakish either, as that’s when Viacom and CBS were re-merged.
Last year, Bakish made a base salary of $3.1 million, an increase of six percent. The bulk of his compensation came from stock awards ($16 million) and non-equity incentive plan compensation ($19.6 million). It helped that ViacomCBS was not among the companies to institute pay cuts last year.
Bakish and Netflix’s two CEOs (more on them below) were among the top 10 highest-paid CEOs for any business in 2020.
Our excuse for Bakish’s pay increase didn’t quite translate to David Zaslav, who geared up forever for the January 2021 launch of the Discovery+ streaming service. Zaslav’s options awards changed from $7 million in 2019 to nada in 2020. His pay dropped by nearly 18 percent.
But don’t feel too badly for the staunch defender of the cable bundle (weirdly, a bit less so since launching Discovery+), since the dude banked an insane $129.4 million in 2018, thanks to an enormous increase in Zaslav’s options award of almost $90 million that year.
Cinemark CEO Mark Zoradi made $600,000 more in 2020 than in 2019, which feels a little odd because his theaters sure did not.
Due to a pandemic-instituted pay cut, Zoradi’s base salary decreased from $1 million to $740,000 and his non-equity incentive plan compensation went to zero. But his stock awards rose from $3.1 million in 2019 to $5.8 million in 2020, a year in which Cinemark stock did anything but rise, falling 36% over the course of the year (at one point it was down 74%).
That didn’t raise a whole bunch of red flags within the industry, however, because…
AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron’s dramatic 115% increase in compensation last year is glaring in the pandemic year. After all, AMC is the No. 1 theater chain in the U.S., and…
Read More: Executive Pay 2021: COVID Hammered Hollywood’s Bottom Line