Dylan Sprouse says The Suite Life wasn't so sweet

Suite Life ran from 2005 to 2008, and the spin-off, The Suite Life On Deck, ran from 2008 to 2011. During that time, Lewis says, “We were on four or five times a night because kids would just rewatch this. They put two episodes on on a Tuesday and they would run them just throughout the whole day.” 

No residuals for nearly 200 episodes of a television show that ran multiple times a day in the mid-2000s? “In a time when residuals would have been great,” Sprouse continues, “not a single paycheck for being arguably one of the most popular shows.” The economics of kids shows have long been a topic of debate. During the SAG strikes, the late Robert Carradine shared a 2019 Lizzy McGuire residual check for zero dollars on Instagram, explaining that’s “why we’re striking.” Sprouse does him one better and explains how Disney broke down its seasons. In his and his brother Cole’s contracts, each calendar year of Suite Life counted as one season, so Disney could film as many episodes a year as it wanted, and it would only count as a season of work without having to pay for it. “We were extremely popular, but also extremely underfunded,” Sprouse adds. “They called it one season because they didn’t have to pay us bumps.”