If you ever needed further proof of the power of social media, check out Kevin Hart. According to the latest hacked emails, the funny man was paid $2 million by Sony for sending out promotional tweets to his 14.8 million followers.
Screenshots posted to the Twitter account BikiniRobotArmy, which has been identified for posting leaked email exchanges, exposed producer Clint Culpepper’s response to whether Hart would tweet something promoting the Denzel Washington film The Equalizer.
‘Yep. He owes us,” he wrote. “I also got him to tweet on NGD (No Good Deed.) We paid him an extra 2M to tweet on 2 pictures. Let me [see] what I can do. What would you have him tweet? A :15 spot saying ‘check it out and I can’t wait to see this?’ Or ‘how excited am I to see Equalizer this weekend?'”
Hart’s promotion of No Good Deed in September was short and to the point, yet earned the star a big paycheck.
‘Make sure yo go support my Brother @willpowerpacker this weekend by seeing “No Good Deed” …. @TherealTaraji & Idris kill this movie!” he wrote.
The going rate for tweets from celebrities apparently has increased dramatically in the past few years. In 2012 Snoop Dogg, who had 6.3 million followers at the time, was in the top tier of payments for tweets, getting upwards of $8,000 per tweet, according to vulture.com.
Jump to two years later and Snoop’s measly $8,000 a tweet seems like child’s play next to Hart’s tweeting paycheck. If this trend continues, will actors and entertainers soon be paid more to tweet than to do the very thing that made them famous in the first place—entertain us?
These latest hacked emails are increasingly interesting because Culpepper is the same executive who got caught chastising Hart for being money hungry, calling him a “whore” after one of Hart’s representatives asked that he paid for promoting one of his films on social media in another hacked email.
Hart later responded via Instagram, writing “Knowing your self worth is extremely important people. I worked very hard to get where I am today. I look at myself as a brand and because of that I will never allow myself to be taking advantage of. I OWN MY BRAND…I MAKE SMART DECISIONS FOR MY BRAND….I PROTECT MY BRAND….which is why I’m able to brush ignorance off of my shoulder and continue to move forward. I refuse to be broken people…with that being said its now time for me to get back to building this empire that I’ve always dreamed of!!!”
