‘Deadpool’ Director Tim Miller Reveals Surprising Amount He Was Paid to Direct the 2016 Movie

Deadpool was a box office smash, but director Tim Miller didn’t personally reap the benefits of its success.

Miller, 60, who made his directorial debut with the 2016 superhero film, revealed his surprising salary during an interview with Collider published on Tuesday, December 24.

“You guys might not know, but it’s not really a profitable thing to be a first-time director in Hollywood, and I’ll tell you exactly,” the filmmaker shared. “I got $225,000 to direct Deadpool. I know it sounds like a lot of money, but for two years of work, that’s not a ton of money.”

Miller continued, “Not that I’m not grateful, I’m f—ing grateful, that’s the way it is because you’re supposed to when you’re a first-time director. My agent said, ‘Dude, you make more on an episode of The Walking Dead!’”

Miller’s payment paled in comparison to the more than $782 million the film made at the box office. However, he feels “uniquely fortunate” to be part of the Deadpool franchise, which went on to include 2018’s Deadpool 2 and 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine, directed by David Leitch and Shawn Levy, respectively.

“Then my second thought is, I wish my director deals had a piece of the merchandising so that I could get some money from all of that,” Miller said.

Deadpool star and coproducer Ryan Reynolds didn’t get rich off the 2016 film either.

“No part of me was thinking when Deadpool was finally greenlit that this would be a success,” Reynolds, 48, told The New York Times in July. “I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen. They wouldn’t allow my cowriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick on set, so I took the little salary I had left and paid them to be on set with me so we could form a de facto writers room.”

Reynolds stands by his decision not to get paid, and he thinks Deadpool turned out better for it.

“I think one of the great enemies of creativity is too much time and money, and that movie had neither time nor money,” he said of the film, which had a $58 million budget compared to the $200 million budget of Deadpool & Wolverine. “It really fostered focusing on character over spectacle, which is a little harder to execute in a comic-book movie. I was just so invested in every micro-detail of it and I hadn’t felt like that in a long, long time. I remembered wanting to feel that more — not just on Deadpool, but on anything.”

After directing Deadpool, Miller went on to create the animated anthology series Love, Death & Robots. He also directed 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate.