Forbes today released their list of Hollywood’s most overpaid actors, finding that Eddie Murphy topped the list, with Katherine Heigl a distant second. I believe Forbes performed the study in conjunction with No Duh Magazine, with help from grant by the No Sh*t Institute’s Department of the Plainly Obvious. This after Murphy toplined Forbes’ number two bomb (hee hee! “number two bomb!”) of the year, A Thousand Words (The Oogieloves should really get some kind of award for managing to be worse than A Thousand Words).

Here’s the list, with the number meaning the amount of box office return for every dollar that actor was paid:

1. Eddie Murphy, $2.30
2. Katherine Heigl, $3.40
3. Reese Witherspoon, $3.90
4. Sandra Bullock, $5
5. Jack Black, $5.20
6. Nic Cage, $6
7. Adam Sandler, $6.30
8. Denzel Washington, $6.30
9. Ben Stiller, $6.50
10. Sarah Jessica Parker, $7

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Now I realize this is going to sound farfetched, but apparently there’s more than just a few ways to burn through a large amount of money very quickly: purchasing excess amounts of black tar heroin, investing poorly in a sh**ty rapper’s vodka company, cramming all that money up a body cavity -or, if you happen to reside in Hollywood, you can always just grossly overpay the star of your next big (supposed) blockbuster. Yeah, that’s also a great way to get rid of a bunch of cash -but just how much money constitutes a bunch? Well, in an apparent attempt to answer that question (and inspire mass suicides everywhere) Forbes just released their 2010 list of Hollywood’s Most Overpaid Actors. You know, just to really help put into perspective how truly underpaid you are at your day job. And just to lay any rumors to rest, neither Nic Cage or Billy Zane made the list this year, sorry.

To formulate their list, Forbes first started with the 36 highest-earning actors from Hollywood. To qualify, during the past five years, each actor would have to have starred in, at least, three films that opened in more than 500 theaters. After this initial categorization, they then began to factor in various other details like penis length and bench press ability.

We used data gathered for our annual Celebrity 100 list to calculate each star’s estimated earnings on each film (including up-front pay and any earnings from the movie’s box-office receipts, DVD and TV sales). We then looked at each movie’s estimated budget [...] and box-office, DVD and television earnings to figure out an operating income for each film.

We added up each star’s compensation on his or her last three films and the operating income on those films, an divided total operating income by the star’s total compensation to come up with a return-on-investment number. The final number represents an average of how much a studio earns for every dollar paid.

Forbes fails to mention how many interns bludgeoned themselves to death with graphing calculators, during the research, but I can only assume the final count was north of ten.

Top 10 Overpaid Actors after the cut.

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