Demi Moore became the highest-paid actress in Hollywood when she decided to star as an exotic dancer in the 1996 film, Striptease.
But despite the huge payday and much talk about Moore baring her body by going topless in the film, it was met with crickets at the domestic box office following its June 28, 1996 release.
The movie debuted in fourth place in theaters, coming in behind The Nutty Professor, Eraser, and Disney’s animated film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which Moore voiced the female lead, Esmerelda.
Domestically, it was considered a flop, with the Los Angeles Times saying, “by anyone’s count—even Hollywood accounting—it was a bomb.” In the U.S., the movie grossed only $33 million on a $50 million budget. In the months that followed, however, it did pick up international traction and eventually turned a profit, with a $113 million haul.
Demi Moore’s Big Payday
As Moore herself tells it in her 2019 memoir Inside Out, the producers of Striptease and G.I. Jane “were kind of in a bidding war” over her at the time. She was already attached to the latter, she wrote, so Striptease had to offer her more, so she’d shoot that one first.
“Suddenly, I was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood,” she recalled, after she secured $12 million for the role of a mom who turns to stripping to make ends meet. Still, she was making nowhere near what her then-husband, Bruce Willis, pulled in for the third Die Hard movie.
“He’d been paid over $20 million…notice the discrepancy. In Hollywood at that time—and, unfortunately, still—for some reason a man is worth almost double what a woman is,” she continued.
Backlash Over Big Bucks
Moore, however, was met with criticism after securing the record-breaking salary.
“Instead of people seeing my big payday as a step in the right direction for women or calling me an inspiration, they came up with something else to call me: Gimme Moore,” she wrote in her book.
Speaking with The New York Times in 2024, the actress wondered why the “choice” was made “to bring me down” over her payday.
“I don’t take this personally. I think anyone who had been in the position that was the first to get that kind of equality of pay would probably have taken a hit,” she said at the time. “But because I did a film that was dealing with the world of stripping and the body, I was extremely shamed.”
In an additional interview with Variety, she also said her salary was “so powerful for me because it wasn’t just about me; it was about changing the playing field for all women.”
In retrospect, Moore wrote in her book that “the ugliness with which people responded to that movie felt tinged with real malice and misogyny.”
She, however, does have some fond memories from production—writing that one of the “best things” about doing the movie was all the time she was able to spend on set with her real-life daughter, Rumer Willis, who also played her daughter on screen.
This story was originally published by Men’s Journal on Jun 28, 2026, where it first appeared in the Entertainment section. Add Men’s Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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