Nia DaCosta , director of "Candyman" and "The Marvels," still hasstudent debt .- She thought landing a huge movie would help pay off her $100k debt load, but that wasn't the reality.
- Actors and directors are typically paid less if they are not as well-known as their counterparts.
Even
Nia DaCosta directed the newly released "Candyman," making history for becoming the first Black woman to direct a movie that landed at #1 at the box office during its opening weekend. Her next movie, "The Marvels," an installment in Disney's mega-blockbuster Marvel Cinematic Universe, is set to come out in 2022.
But as she revealed in Audioboom's Blank Check podcast, landing those huge directing roles still wasn't enough to wipe out the $100,000 student-debt load she started with.
In 2019, New York Times columnist Julia Rothman was interviewing people on the streets of New York about their debt, and she ran into DaCosta, who called her student debt "a dull pain" but said if she landed a huge movie, she would be able to pay it all off "in one fell swoop."
"Life if I get an 'Avengers' movie, my first big purchase will be to pay it all off," DaCosta told Rothman.
Since that interview, DaCosta landed not one, but two, huge movies. Despite more or less actually getting an "Avengers" movie, she said on the Audioboom podcast that she still has student debt, and it comes down to pay equity in the
"I was like, I will only pay them off if I get a Marvel movie, and now that I have one, I'm like 'Jesus, I'm still not going to pay them all off,'" DaCosta said. "Everyone thinks I literally paid them off when I got the job, which is not how you get paid through the [Directors Guild of America]."
Insider previously reported on the pay scale for movies in Hollywood and found that even if actors are starring in a film, they might get paid less than their better-known colleagues. For example, Gal Gadot, the star of "Wonder Woman," only got paid $150,000, since at the time, she was not yet a big name in the industry. Given that DaCosta was not a well-known name when she first landed her directing roles for "Candyman" and "The Marvels", the situation for her was likely similar.
And her plight with student debt reflects a burden 45 million Americans continue to shoulder. Insider has reported on the prison-like effects student debt can have on borrowers, with some feeling like they're in a never-ending cycle of payments.
President Joe Biden has so far canceled $9.5 billion in student debt, but that's just 0.6% of the $1.7 trillion of student debt in the nation, and borrowers are pushing for wide-scale cancelation to give them long-needed relief.
"I've paid back almost all of my loans, but I still owe the full amount," one borrower previously told Insider. "It's a never-ending cycle."