http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d817b680-33a0-11db-981f-0000779e2340.html

An excerpt:

"The good news is that Mr Cruise takes no cash fee up front for his acting or producing role, which otherwise would be $35m-plus per film. The bad news is that Mr Cruise gets 22 per cent of the gross revenues received by the studio on the theatrical release and the television licensing. Even worse, from the studio’s point of view, is Mr Cruise’s 12 per cent cut of Paramount’s total DVD receipts.

What most stars and other Hollywood participants get is a cut not of the DVD revenue itself but of a 20 per cent “royalty”. The other 80 per cent goes to a subsidiary of the studio, the home entertainment division. In other words, in the conventional deal for most other stars, one arm of the corporation collects all the money from DVDs and then pays a mere 20 per cent of it to the studio, which then becomes the “gross” number that the studios report to participants. The justification for this system was that, unlike other rights, such as television licences, which require virtually no sales expenses, DVDs have to be manufactured and marketed. So, usually stars and other participants get their share of just the 20 per cent royalty. For example, if a star has a 10 per cent participation, he gets 10 per cent of only the 20 per cent, or just 2 per cent. But not Mr Cruise. He insisted – and gained – in his first Mission: Impossible deal “100 per cent accounting”, which means that the studio, after deducting the manufacturing expenses, paid Mr Cruise his 22 per cent share of the total receipts."