Norman Scott/startraksphoto.comTom Cruise played a hair-metal legend in Rock of Ages. Up next...Neil Diamond?
Aside from Diamond's many hits and his continued heartthrob status at 71, the singer-songwriter is also quite famous for having paid one of the heftiest divorce settlements in Hollywood history—$150 million by all estimates—in the mid-1990s to his second wife, Marcia Murphey.
But that came after 25 years.
There's no chance that Katie Holmes, who filed for divorce from Cruise last week after five years—not to mention a prenuptial agreement—together, will have a shot at that kind of money.
Is there?
While the prenup probably lays out in very clear detail exactly what Holmes gets from Cruise in the event of a divorce, based on length of marriage, reason for the split, etc., the matter of child support could still be left open to a judge's discretion.
Sure, spending decades as a top-earning, box-office-smashing (most of the time) movie star is great for day-to-day life. But that level of success sure can turn into an albatross when it comes time to divvy up, can't it?
You may not have seen Rock of Ages, or Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol before that—but Cruise made $75 million over the last 12 months all the same, landing him atop Forbes' latest list of Hollywood's highest-paid actors between May 2011 and May 2012.
"This was a huge year for Tom Cruise," Dorothy Pomerantz, Forbes' L.A. bureau chief, told E! News, adding that Cruise conceivably could have taken in roughly $200 million over the last five years. (In the meantime, he's rumored to be worth upwards of $275 million—remember, very rich people have very rich expenses.)
"He makes super-smart deals on these movies and they continue to pay off," she said. "And when we look at his earnings, we see that he still earns from older films too. When a Tom Cruise movie is on TV and they are played endlessly, he gets money from that. He just has this really great stream of revenue."
Forbes estimates that Holmes earned roughly $5 million last year.
Former Dawson's Creek star Holmes filed for divorce in New York, where the law dictates that the assets accumulated during the course of a marriage be divided via equitable distribution. That usually amounts to half and half, except for in special cases of egregious misconduct and other things we certainly hope neither Cruise nor Holmes engaged in.
Meanwhile, Cruise is expected to counterfile the divorce in La-La Land, and California law is all about community property—meaning both spouses jointly own everything accumulated (no matter who technically paid for it) during the marriage and whatever gets labeled community property at the time of their divorce is divided up 50-50.
In addition to their respective checks for acting, the pair formerly known as TomKat acquired a 10,286-square-foot Beverly Hills estate for $30.5 million back in April 2007 and a Manhattan brownstone for more than $15 million in April 2009.
—Additional reporting by Baker Machado