He wasn’t that dumb. He had this fantastic exchange:
“Which one of you guys wants to be a general? Pinkley?”
“What kind of a general sir?”
“Just a plain, ordinary, everyday home loving American general.”
“I’d rather be a civilian sir.”
But, but(t)…he revealed bum in “Animal House”! 
Well, his math is way, way off:
Given the choice to earn a fee of either 2 percent of the film’s gross profits or his typical day rate of $25,000, he took the latter. “I told [distributor Universal Pictures], ‘No, you need to pay me my daily rate,’ ” he recalled to Variety in 2014.
But Animal House, which starred John Belushi, Tim Matheson, John Vernon, Verna Bloom, Karen Allen and more, went on to become a box office smash, earning over $120 million worldwide.
Had Sutherland taken that small percentage of the movie’s gross, by his own calculations he “could have ended up with $14 million,” the actor told Variety.
To get 14 mil, the movie would have had to make 700 mil, not 120. Plus that’s on profit, not gross, and I believe that Hollywood accountants have made a fine art of making sure no movie ever turns a paper profit, so all the backend deals wind up paying out nothing.