David Krumholtz told reporters on May 26 that his residual payments from the long-running The Santa Clause franchise now total about $150 a year. He delivered the number while promoting the New York City Center revival of Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, in which he plays comedy writer Abe Burrows, and punctuated it bluntly: "They’re minimal because the movie plays so much."
Krumholtz converted the surprise into a short lesson: "This is how residuals work: Every time it plays, you make less. It’s a grade scale." He said that when the original film first paid out, "it was good," but over time the per-play amount has fallen. He played Bernard the Head Elf in the 1994 The Santa Clause, returned for The Santa Clause 2 in 2002, did not appear in The Santa Clause 3, and came back for the 2022 Disney+ series — a run that, he noted, has not translated into large ongoing checks.
The shrinkage is not limited to holiday staples. Krumholtz said his single biggest residuals nowadays come from a much newer film: Oppenheimer — but even that yields a modest sum. "It’s $12.73. It’s enough to buy a hot dog in New York," he said, using the figure to underline how small these payments can be, even on prestige projects.
Those numbers land differently against one hard fact: The Santa Clause has remained a holiday favorite for more than three decades. The films and the later streaming series get repeated visibility every season. The friction Krumholtz described is that frequency does not automatically mean rising pay. His description of a declining, grade-based residual schedule explains why a movie that plays a lot can still produce minimal annual income for a supporting actor.
What the actor did not supply was the arithmetic tying plays to dollars. He did not explain how many airings or streams were counted, what scale of decline applies at each stage, or how those inputs produce the roughly $150 figure he cited. That gap matters because the anecdote invites a wider question: how do residual formulas allocate value over decades for films that remain culturally persistent?
For now, Krumholtz is moving forward onstage and on screen. He was speaking at the press day for Are You Now or Have You Ever Been on May 26, and he is also set to appear in Supergirl. The numbers he quoted make one thing plain: Krumholtz will be relying on new work — steady acting gigs and live theater — for meaningful pay rather than legacy checks from a franchise that keeps returning to viewers every holiday season. He left the exact conversion of plays to that $150 unexplained, but he made clear where he plans to earn his next paycheck.
