I don't really get the problems here.
If Robin Williams wanted to be paid more, he could.
"Don't use my voice in the marketing" doesn't mean don't ever show the Genie or make toys of the Genie. We'd have to see the actual contract language, but he would be immensely naive to think they'd never show the character or make toys of it.
When they say Robin Williams was "paid scale" for Aladdin, that means he was paid the absolute lowest amount of money that the Screen Actors Guild would allow any actor to be paid for X hours of work on an animated film with a budget of Y. It doesn't matter if you're Robin Williams or some nobody making his voice acting debut, the absolute least that any actor was allowed to be paid for voicing The Genie was $70,000. The Union does the math on that, and they call it "scale".
It's impossible that Robin Williams "just happened" to be paid so little, or that he had a bad agent, or that he got ripped off. He specifically set his pay to the absolute floor, because he told Disney that he didn't want to be a part of any marketing.
And Disney apparently respected that, until they got mad that Robin wouldn't
also quit an unrelated job with a competitor, so they brought the lawyers in, re-read his contract, and betrayed the spirit of the deal while adhering to the letter of the deal.
Which resulted in burned bridges and two major corporate apologies. I mean, the CEO of Disney doesn't normally just gift people with $1 million Picassos.
Sounds like he changed his tune once they paid him a million dollars, so the idea that this is this some kind of moral thing for him seems a bit of a made-up argument.
You're allowed to take a principled stance once, get betrayed, wait for an apology, and then resume doing business with someone, while
not taking that same stance a second time.
That Ferngully shit was awful. Am I supposed to be sympathetic to that doing poorly?
No. You're supposed to be sympathetic to Disney using underhanded tactics to try and crush their weaker competitors because "Disney's property" (Robin Williams) dares to defy Disney and tries to do business with them.
