#49 Jennifer Lawrence
Jennifer Lawrence lands on our list for the first time. The actress who ranks 49th with $26 million. It’s hard to think of an actress who had a better year than Lawrence. She started 2012 with The Hunger Games which grossed $690 million at the global box office making it one of the highest-grossing movies of the year. Lawrence was paid less than $1 million upfront for her work on the film but she made up for that with a much fatter paycheck to revisit the role of Katniss Everdeen for the sequel, Catching Fire. As Katniss, Lawrence has shown that action heroes don't always have to be played by men for a film to turn a profit.
Then she won her first Oscar as Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook (it was the 22-year-old’s second nomination). The smaller movie turned a nice profit off its own bringing in $236 million on a $20 million budget. Lawrence has a slew of blockbusters and art films on deck for the next year including X-Men: Days of Future Past and American Hustle from Silver Linings director David O. Russell and co-starring Silver Linings star Bradley Cooper.
#87 Suzanne Collins
With the March 2012 release of the first movie based on Collins' The Hunger Games series, her books found new life. Last year the trilogy sold 27.7 million copies, according to Publisher's Weekly, 8.8 million of those books sold were expensive hard backs. With three more movies from her dystopian trilogy set for release, Collins should keep raking in the money for the next several years.