How Mark Wahlberg became the king of streaming

Published on

November 20, 2025

As theatrical releases decline, the 54-year-old actor has become the most bankable star on Netflix, Amazon and Apple—earning $20 million or more a movie—in a major paradigm shift of Hollywood economics. Inside the new A-Minus List.

Mark Wahlberg (Justin NG/Avalon/Newscom)

The list of actors who could replace Robert Downey Jr. was very small, but Amazon executives had to draw one up in 2023 after the Oscar-winner pulled out of a starring role in one of its projects to re-join the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The filmmakers knew they needed someone with a sense of humor, action hero chops, and most important, star power. In the end, they came to the same conclusion many streaming producers have in the past five years—Mark Wahlberg.

“We always intended for there to be a star in it,” says Julie Rapaport, Amazon MGM Studios’ head of film, production and development. “There is a comfort for audiences and familiarity of faces with a star like Mark, so people want to watch what his next movie is going to be, whether it’s theatrical or streaming.”

Man of Action: Wahlberg is bankable in thrillers, such as 2025’s ‘Play Dirty’ (left) and family comedies. His new movie, ‘The Family Plan 2’ (right) combines the genres. (Jasin Boland/Prime Amazon Content Services LLC; Apple)

For the 54-year-old Wahlberg, it’s been a steady stream of streamers recently. With the release of Play Dirty in October on Prime Video and The Family Plan 2 for AppleTV on Friday, Wahlberg will have starred in seven streaming movies since 2020, for four different services (Netflix and Paramount+ being the others). While direct-to-video projects were once a sign of decline in Hollywood, Wahlberg’s embrace of straight-to-streaming movies has been extremely lucrative—Forbes estimates he earns A-list money, $20 to 25 million per project—and signals a new paradigm for Hollywood.

Traditionally, movie stardom was measured by an actor’s ability to perform at the box office. But in the current entertainment landscape, in which the number of theatrical releases is in decline and celebrity alone does little to guarantee success—Dwayne Johnson’s The Smashing Machine, Sydney Sweeney’s Christie and Glen Powell’s The Running Man being recent examples—a growing number of actors just below the highest tier of stardom have migrated to streaming platforms where they’re still able to use their instantly recognizable faces to draw in those scrolling by the movie or show’s tile on a given platform, and are rewarded with huge guaranteed paydays.

Call it the A-Minus List. After all, the actors are paid top dollar to appear in a project, minus the bonus incentives on the back end—because there isn’t one. Included in this elite set are Kevin Hart, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman and Millie Bobby Brown, all of whom have starred almost exclusively on Netflix in recent years and have received salaries that insiders agree they would be unable to command in the turbulent theatrical marketplace. There’s also Jennifer Lopez, who received an estimated $16.5 million to produce and star in Netflix’s Atlas in 2024, and Jake Gyllenhaal, who made an estimated $23 million combined from Prime Video’s Road House remake and the AppleTV series Presumed Innocent in 2024.

By comparison, Forbes estimates that the biggest box office stars, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington, can command $30 million up to even $40 million for a rare streaming project.

Yet it is Wahlberg, famous for his 4 a.m. wakeup calls and numerous entrepreneurial ventures, who is hustling harder than the rest. In 2025, he has had the pair of streaming exclusives plus the limited theatrical release Flight Risk—which earned just $48 million at the box office in January but performed well in video-on-demand. Combined with earnings from TV producing and back catalog residuals, Forbes estimates Wahlberg earned $60 million this year before taxes and fees to agents, managers and lawyers. That number would have been large enough to place him at No. 5 on the highest-paid actors of 2024.

Spy Hard: 2024’s ‘The Union’ (co-starring Halle Berry) is just outside Netflix’s all-time top 10 movies by viewership. (Laura Radford/Netflix)

“The biggest star in streaming is Mark Wahlberg,” WME executive chairman Ari Emanuel said last month on an episode of “The Town” podcast, making a point to differentiate him from the top theatrical draws. “Without a doubt on the movie side. There’s no question, just go look at all his movies.”

Emanuel’s hype isn’t exactly objective—he has been Wahlberg’s agent for some 30 years and inspired Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold character on the hit HBO show Entourage, which Wahlberg produced—but the numbers back it up. According to Parrot Analytics’ valuations of global streaming revenue across all major platforms, Wahlberg’s movies have generated an estimated $680 million since 2020, accounting for subscriber acquisition, retention, and advertising.

Play Dirty debuted as the No. 1 movie across all streaming platforms the week of its release on Prime Video, racking up nearly 23 million hours in its first three weeks. Apple said 2023’s The Family Plan was its most-watched movie ever after its release, and 2024’s The Union sits just outside Netflix’s all-time top 10 movies by viewership. Per Netflix’s engagement report for the first half of 2025, users spent more than 350 million hours watching Wahlberg’s movies between January and June, 30% more than platform tentpole Adam Sandler. Wahlberg is the star of seven of the top 170 most-watched movies on Netflix during that span, while only one other actor, Denzel Washington, has appeared in more than two.

Wahlberg hasn’t completely abandoned theatrical releases either. He played second lead in 2022’s Uncharted and in recent years fronted a handful of smaller budget independent films such as Flight Risk, Father Stu and Arthur The King, but streaming is now the place where his star shines brightest.

Brandon Katz, director of insights at Greenlight Analytics, says Wahlberg is now more of an “added value element” to a theatrical movie, rather than the “primary incentive,” having trained audiences to expect to find him on streaming. Greenlight regularly surveys moviegoers on actors’ drawing power to theaters and streaming, and though Wahlberg scored in the 48th percentile for theaters (41% “Will See – Theaters”), his streaming score (54% “Will See – Streaming”) was on par with Tom Cruise (52%) and Dwayne Johnson (56%).

At a time when the kinds of movies Wahlberg specializes in—guy-with-a-gun action and family comedy (or both at the same time, in the case of The Family Plan 2) that aren’t part of a franchise—are disappearing from theatrical release calendars in favor of targeted niche films or massive brand-driven blockbusters, streaming viewers have shown consistently that they cannot resist a fun genre flick with a familiar face.

“We’ve seen star power wane theatrically as [intellectual property] and brand power has increased over the last 15 years,” says Katz. “But it’s still very important in streaming, it still drives viewership. And if it didn’t, you wouldn’t see every single major streamer investing tens of millions of dollars in paydays to major stars.”

Sandler was the first to capitalize on this major shift in movie stardom in 2014, seeing diminishing returns at the box office and pivoting to a multi-picture deal with Netflix that was reportedly worth $250 million, renewing the deal several times since. “I gotta tell you,” Wahlberg said in a 2014 interview when asked about Sandler’s move. “For me, personally, I am interested in knowing the reasons and economics behind those deals.”

Around that time, Forbes estimates Wahlberg was earning $15-17 million up front for his theatrical movies, with the promise of a small percentage of each movie’s profits in the case of breakout success. But by the mid-2010s his movies Deepwater Horizon, Patriots Day and Mile 22 were already struggling to generate big back ends. Streaming deals, on the other hand, pay an upfront fee plus a “buyout” of a star’s profit share as if it had been a modest success in theaters (streamers are experimenting with performance-based compensation, but it is not yet widely adopted). Beginning with 2020’s Spenser Confidential, Wahlberg earned an estimated $24 million and never looked back.

Unlike Sandler or Kevin Hart, another star who generates most of his own material and has set up a production pipeline under one banner since signing a four-picture deal with Netflix in 2021 for more than $100 million, Wahlberg’s value in the marketplace is largely as a star-for-hire. He was not a credited producer on Play Dirty, nor will he be for his next movie, a comedy for Prime Video called Balls Up. It’s this malleability that has made him incredibly desirable to every major platform, in any kind of movie.

“Mark Wahlberg’s talents defy categorization,” says Josh Greenstein, co-chair of Paramount Pictures and vice chair of platforms, via email. “He is a giant worldwide theatrical star, global streaming star, prolific producer, and a successful entrepreneur. For decades he has had tremendous, genre-defying success, from Ted to The Fighter to The Family Plan, to name just a few. Simply put, there is no one like him.”

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This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.