Celebrity 100: The World's Top-Paid Entertainers 2015

Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao, Katy Perry and One Direction top this year's Celebrity 100 list--the first truly global ranking of the highest paid entertainers on the planet.

Floyd Mayweather might have just had the least surprising $300 million payday of all time. His total—the highest annual sum ever for an athlete—mostly comes from his May 2 victory over Manny Pacquiao, who took home $160 million on the year. Their bout spawned a record 4.4 million Pay-Per-View buys and copious media coverage from Mayweather’s Las Vegas home turf to Pacquiao’s native Philippines.

The boxers rank first and second on this year’s Celebrity 100 list, which measures the earnings of the highest-paid entertainers on the planet over the past 12 months. The third-ranked star, however, may be a bit more unexpected: Katy Perry, who clocked a whopping $135 million. Like many, she was unimpressed by the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight.

“I didn’t really watch it,” said Perry, the subject of this year’s Celeb 100 cover story. “But I heard there wasn’t really much to watch, anyway.”

Perry is part of the burgeoning batch of stars cashing in on an increasingly global entertainment landscape. As part of her Prismatic World Tour, she played 124 shows during our scoring period; 75 of them took place abroad, in 27 different countries. According to her managers, 60% of her income now pours in from foreign markets.

One Direction takes the No. 4 spot for similar reasons: The world’s biggest boy band played 74 dates over the past 12 months, averaging seven-figure grosses at every stop, hitting every continent besides Antarctica. Thanks to a strong touring drive—and profound changes in the concert business, spurred by the rise of the global middle class—the group earned more than twice as much as the Rolling Stones.

“You don’t have to go back and play New York, Detroit, Chicago, over and over again,” says Gary Bongiovanni, chief of touring data provider Pollstar. “There are a lot of other territories for artists to play.”

Hollywood is benefiting from this sort of trend as well. Avengers: Age of Ultrongrossed $240 million in China, whose monthly box office surpassed the U.S. for the first time this past February. Robert Downey, Jr. (No. 8) earned double-digit millions for playing Iron Man in that film en route to a career-high $80 million payday, tying him with Taylor Swift, whose best-selling album 1989 moved 3.7 million units in 2014.

Meanwhile, Vin Diesel (No. 43) banked $47 million thanks to a back-end cut onFurious 7, which brought in $1.5 billion worldwide. More than $1 billion of that sum came from abroad, including roughly $400 million in China, where it’s the highest-grossing film of all-time. That’s a badge of honor for the ethnically ambiguous Diesel, who told FORBES he’d like to be remembered one day as “the person who brought multiculturalism to the world through my existence.”

FORBES has released the Celeb 100 list every year since 1999, with superstars from Jerry Seinfeld to Beyoncé gracing the cover. Given the profound changes in the entertainment world, we decided to change our methodology a bit this time around. For the first time, we made the list truly international: instead of using U.S.-centric power metrics, we’re simply ranking the world’s 100 highest-paid celebrities, regardless of nationality.

The result is a more accurate reflection of the current entertainment landscape, a 21st century reality where Bollywood’s biggest stars (Salman Khan and Amitabh Bachchan, $33.5 million apiece) earn more than some Hollywood A-listers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Channing Tatum, $29 million apiece).

This year, we also refocused the Celeb 100 by ranking only “front of the camera” talent, jettisoning powerbroker producers who make most of their money behind the scenes. Our list measures money earned from June 1, 2014 to June 1, 2015 before subtracting management fees and taxes; figures are based on data from Nielsen, Pollstar, Box Office Mojo and IMDB, as well as interviews with agents, managers, lawyers—and many of the stars themselves.

Most importantly, we made sure to look for candidates in all corners of the globe, and sure enough, 32 members of this year’s list hail from outside the U.S. The U.K. boasted 13 names ranging from chef Gordon Ramsay (No. 21, $60 million) to singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran (No. 27, $57 million). Other countries sent stars as varied as Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova (No. 88, $29.5 million) and Canadian rapperDrake (No. 54, $39.5 million).