I mean they’re not all super rich but especially in the USA and especially with actors or TV personalities it seems like the well known ones make huge amounts of money. Just picking people at random and doing some searching online, apparently Scott Bakula got paid $120,000 for each episode of NCIS: New Orleans he was in which totalled over $18 million. Some sources say that Sarah Sherman, who’s been on SNL for 3 seasons, is worth around $4 million. Why do they get paid huge amounts of money when most people, even if they’re at the top of their industry, make a fraction of that?
Firstly it’s a fraction of a percent of the pool of people working as entertainers that get paid anything close to a comfortable salary—many don’t even last a few years and make basically nothing before they change careers.
The successful ones get paid a load basically because the people that invest in funding TV shows & films know that you can generally multiply your investment by attaching a household name to the project. Now this is for several reasons, firstly a household name will generally actually be a good actor. Secondly, people recognising a member of your cast means they’re generally more likely to watch it. Finally, there’s the effect on the rest of the casting—some studios might take the opportunity to push the compensation of the “no-name” actors down because they have an opportunity to work with a star, others might go the other way and use the first star in negotiations to get additional starts signed on to the project.
So essentially, the big projects make a lot of money, and executives attribute a significant part of that generated value to having the big star involved, and so they portion the funding to ensure that happens.
There’s also the negotiation factor on long running shows, main characters end up in good negotiation positions for more money if a show is successful and their character isn’t easy to kill off. This is also why Netflix tries to cancel stuff before the 3rd season—that’s about the point who holds the power in negotiations shifts away from the studio.
An in-demand actor is a finite resource, they can only really work on one or two projects at any given time, so this also pushes their fees up as projects may end up in bidding wars. Conversely most entertainment costs very little to sell beyond the initial production costs, so after that’s broken even it’s free profit they can use for these fees.
Tl;dr capitalism