Here's a brief interview with Peter Cullen, a fine voiceover performer. Peter played Venger on the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show (which'll be out on DVD in December, they're now saying) but his big animation role was Optimus Prime on The Transformers. Wise people now doing the live-action movie of that property have seen fit to engage him again…because it just won't be Optimus Prime if it doesn't sound like Cullen.
There's an unfortunate tendency in the movie business to think of voice actors as not real stars. If Mel Blanc were still around and they were making a big Bugs Bunny feature — especially if it was live-action and therefore a bit removed from the old context — there'd be some studio exec who'd say, "Hey, can we get Mel Gibson to do the rabbit's voice? Or one of those Wayans Brothers?" What they don't realize is that the character is the star and the voice actor is an integral part of the character. They also don't realize that voice actors are stars, too. In fact, they're big stars…huge stars.
Stars in Hollywood are judged by how their movies gross. If you're in a movie that takes in $600 million, you're a bigger star than someone who was in a movie that took in a measly $300 million. If you're in a number of movies that take in a lot of money, you're a bigger star that someone who's in a lesser number of movies with lesser receipts. Stars are hired and they command top salaries because of their past grosses.
Now…suppose you fed into a computer the cast lists of all the movies and cross-indexed that with the grosses. Wouldn't it be interesting to see who was in the cast list of movies that had collectively grossed the most money? Can you guess where I'm going with this?
Here are the box office grosses going back a couple of decades for my pal — and maybe the best voiceover actor ever — Frank Welker. If you go by this, he was the number one grossing actor of the nineties, ahead of Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Williams or Bruce Willis…and I'll bet the total for Frank is, if anything, low. He was in a lot of movies for which he did not receive credit. (Okay, so some of his standing is due to sheer volume. When you only work one or two days on a movie, you can be in a lot of them. But it's still an interesting way of looking at the situation.)
And it's also kind of neat to note that Stan Lee is, at the moment, #20 on the Box Office List for this decade, ahead of Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy.