Saving Matt Damon: Sometimes It’s Better Not to Be the Hero
Are movies better when Matt Damon saves others, or when billions of dollars are spent bringing him home? We crunched the numbers to find out.
With The Odyssey hitting theaters this week, it’s worth noting that a little over 30 years ago, a 25-year-old Matt Damon, who had just played a guy named Edgar Pudwhacker in the 1995 film Glory Daze, embarked on an epic cinematic odyssey of his own. Between 1996 and 1998, the “Saving Matt Damon” trilogy made up of Courage Under Fire (1996), Good Will Hunting (1997), and Saving Private Ryan (1998), pulled in $809 million at the worldwide box office, garnered 20 Oscar nominations, and helped Damon and Ben Affleck become the youngest writers to win a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for their Good Will Hunting script (Matt was 27 and Ben was 25).
With a worldwide haul of $485 million, Saving Private Ryan was Damon’s highest-grossing film until 2014, when the Christopher Nolan-directed Interstellar pulled in $764 million on the strength of Matthew McConaughey’s pronunciation of the name “Murph” and an all-time great cameo(ish) appearance by Damon (who needed rescuing). A year later, Ridley Scott’s The Martian, which dedicates 83% of its running time to saving Damon, collected $631 million at the worldwide box office and was nominated for seven Oscars. If you are familiar with the 1989 film Field of Dreams, which features Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as “Baseball Fans at Fenway Park,” you understand when we say “If Matt Damon needs rescuing, they will come.”
Since The Odyssey features Damon on another epic quest that involves imprisonment, daring rescues, and a long journey home, we decided to comb through his filmography so we could analyze the Matt Damon movies in which he is saved — and compare them to the movies in which he saves people, zoos, or Nike’s basketball division. Is it better if Damon saves? Or do moviegoers and critics prefer it when billions of dollars are spent bringing him home? For information on how we sorted the films, check the NOTES section at the end.
[Warning: Spoilers follow.]
Saving Matt Damon
Films: Courage Under Fire, Good Will Hunting, Saving Private Ryan, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Interstellar, The Martian
Tomatometer Average: 79%
Popcornmeter Average: 82.1%
Average Worldwide Box Office: $338 million
Films Nominated for Best Picture (or Best Animated Feature): Good Will Hunting, Saving Private Ryan, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, The Martian
Academy Award Nominations: 33
What’s interesting is that only 12.9% (seven of 54, cameos excluded) of Damon’s films have dedicated a majority of their screen time towards saving him in literal or metaphorical ways (not just once like in Green Zone). This is a far cry from Tom Cruise, who runs in 91% of his films, or Damon’s Ocean’s costar Brad Pitt, who eats food in 67% of his movies. Damon gets a wild amount of press for his seven “being saved” films, much like Tom Hanks, his Saving Private Ryan co-star, who receives an equal amount of press for doing or talking about a very specific thing in 21.6% of his films. Can you guess it?
The reason the “saving” bit has garnered so much press is due to Damon’s selectiveness, smart decisions, and the fact that the films were directed by Edward Zwick, Gus Van Sant, Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Christopher Nolan and Ridley Scott. One of the smartest things Damon has ever done was advocate for Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Drugstore Cowboy, To Die For) to direct Good Will Hunting. Van Sant had worked wonders with River Phoenix, Nicole Kidman, Keanu Reeves, and Kelly Lynch, and he allowed Damon, Robin Williams (who won an Oscar for his amazing performance), and Minnie Driver to flourish in the naturalistic world he created.
The great thing about Saving Private Ryan is that initially, you want to jumpkick Private Ryan when he refuses to return home with Captain Miller (Hanks). After 116 minutes of watching likable characters die in their quest to save Ryan, the audience was primed to resent the square-jawed kid who doesn’t feel the emotional weight of the prior deaths. However, as we get to know Private Ryan, our perception of him starts to change, as he proves himself to be a sincere kid who wants to do the honorable thing. Damon earned the audience’s respect.
This is the complete opposite in Interstellar. At first, audiences were super pumped to see Damon appear at the 137-minute mark, because it meant everything was going to be fine. This isn’t the case, and the surprise twist is absolutely beautiful. Christopher Nolan cast Damon in Interstellar because when audiences saw him, they would say, “Oh, it’s Matt Damon. It’s going to be okay.” Thus, he used the audience’s expectations of the usually warm-spirited actor to turn him into a surprise villain who needed rescuing so he could escape a lonely death on an ice planet.
A neat fact about Ridley Scott’s The Martian is that Damon was reluctant about signing on because he had just played a “guy alone on a planet” in Interstellar. Luckily, Scott was smart enough to say, “Nobody gives a s— about that,” and it resulted in Damon’s third Academy Award nomination for acting.
We’ve established that audiences, critics, and award shows love it when Matt Damon is saved. Do they appreciate it when he saves people?
Matt Damon Saves Others
Films: John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, Rounders, Titan A.E., The Brothers Grimm, Hereafter, Happy Feet Two, Contagion, We Bought a Zoo, Promised Land, Elysium, The Monuments Men, The Great Wall, Stillwater, Air
Tomatometer Average: 59%
Popcornmeter Average: 61%
Average Worldwide Box Office: $90 million
Films Nominated for Best Picture: 0
Academy Award Nominations: 1
With the success of Courage Under Fire, Good Will Hunting, and Saving Private Ryan, it’s easy to forget that The Rainmaker and Rounders were also released between 1996 and 1998. Neither were box office hits, but they proved Matt Damon could play intelligent characters who weren’t responsible for the deaths of Tom Hanks or Meg Ryan. In the Francis Ford Coppola-directed The Rainmaker, Damon plays a lawyer who potentially saves thousands of lives when he defeats a shady insurance company. In Rounders, he’s a law student and poker enthusiast who saves his best friend Worm (a super slimy Edward Norton) from a guy named Teddy KGB (John Malkovich), who, unsurprisingly to everyone, has ties to the KGB.
Seven of the 14 films are Rotten, and only Rounders (1998), Contagion (2011), and Air (2023) have a Tomatometer Score or Popcornmeter Score above 85%. Rounders is a cult classic with an 87% on the Popcornmeter, and Air has a 93% on the Tomatometer. Both of these films feature Damon playing an intelligent person who saves the day by gambling his way to success. In Air, he bets the entire Nike marketing budget on Michael Jordan, and in Rounders, he defeats John Malkovich’s cookie-loving character with a nut straight. Toss in We Bought a Zoo, which sees Damon dumping all of his money into renovating a zoo, and audiences like seeing Damon risking it all to save the day.
The most prolific of his “saving films” is 2011’s Contagion, which reunited Damon with Steven Soderbergh for their sixth feature together (including Damon’s cameo in Che: Part Two). Contagion infected audiences all over the world as it pulled in $136.5 million worldwide and became very relevant during the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic. Calling Contagion a “Damon Saves” film may seem like a stretch, but Damon’s disease-immune character spends the majority of the film keeping his daughter safe from the super-virus and outside violence.
Matt Damon Thrives in Science Fiction, but Keep Him Away from Fantasy Films (That Aren’t Directed by Christopher Nolan)
Films: The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Brothers Grimm, Hereafter, The Great Wall
Tomatometer Average: 47.4%
Popcornmeter Average: 53.8%
Worldwide Box Office: $124 million
Academy Award Nominations: 1
The only “Saving Damon” film that has a Rotten score is the 2000 film The Legend of Bagger Vance. The fantasy about a magical caddie helping a traumatized war veteran get his golf swing back is Rotten at 43% and only grossed $40 million at the worldwide box office. It’s easy to understand why Damon signed up for the film, because director Robert Redford was red hot at the time, and his co-star Will Smith was arguably the biggest A-lister on the planet. But there wasn’t much of an audience for fantasy golf dramas in 2000.
When it comes to The Brothers Grimm, Damon was director Terry Gilliam’s second pick after Johnny Depp, and shortly before production began, Damon and co-star Heath Ledger swapped roles so they could play characters they hadn’t inhabited before. The end result isn’t great. In The Great Wall, the most memorable thing about his character (who helps save the world) is his ponytail. If pressed, we’d safely guess that 99.9% of the people who watched the film can’t remember the name of his character, who helped save China from alien monsters.
It’s not a “Saving Damon” film, but there’s also the 1999 dark-fantasy-comedy Dogma, which features Damon playing Loki, a fallen angel who has found a loophole to get back into heaven. The Kevin Smith-directed movie features poop monsters, guardian angels, and demon kids, but it always feels grounded thanks to Smith’s dialogue-heavy screenplay and laid-back approach to filmmaking. Oddly enough, Dogma pairs well with The Odyssey in that they are about Damon dealing with gods as he tries to get back home.
If You Want to Save Matt Damon, Numbers Are Important
The best movies about saving Matt Damon involve math and numbers in some way. Damon’s breakout performance came, of course, when he played Will Hunting, a 20-year-old mathematics genius who is the smartest janitor to ever clean the halls of Harvard. (In real life, Damon attended Harvard for three years but dropped out in 1993 to pursue acting.) Will Hunting was originally supposed to be a physics genius, but after some advice from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow, he was rewritten as a math prodigy with a penchant for solving complex equations on chalkboards. From this moment, anytime Damon talked numbers, audiences rolled with it. For instance, when Damon said “Let’s do the math” in The Martian, nobody in the theater second-guessed him, because it’s Matt Damon doing math, and of course the numbers totally add up.
It’s also worth noting that much ado has been made about how much money is spent in efforts to save Damon. The current estimate is $900 billion, which seems like a lot, but it must have cost incredible amounts of money to build the Earth evacuation spaceship in Titan A.E., and the various Mars missions in The Martian would empty any country’s reserves.
Finally let’s not forget that the iconic line “Well, I got her number. How do you like them apples?” comes about because Damon snags a phone number in Good Will Hunting. OK, that’s a stretch, but we’re going with it.
How to Make the Perfect “Saving Matt Damon” Movie
Based on the available numbers and facts (pretend this is being written on a chalkboard).
A blue-collar Matt Damon + super intelligence + an inhospitable location + a doctorate degree + a supporting cast of intelligent people + Jessica Chastain (she’s in Interstellar and The Martian) + Christopher Nolan + a treacherous journey + a film title that specifically references Damon’s character = Another Oscar nomination for Damon.
Fun Fact: Good Will Hunting, Saving Private Ryan, and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron were nominated for Best Picture or Best Animated Feature.
How to make the Perfect “Matt Damon Saves” Movie
A blue-Collar Matt Damon who is super smart and amiable (but has an edge) + a name that begins with “M” (his characters in Contagion and Rounders are Mitch and Mike) + gambling + a nice family + Oreo cookies + Ben Affleck = At least a Golden Globe nomination and a super Fresh Tomatometer score.
NOTES
Being Saved: Between Courage Under Fire, Good Will Hunting, Saving Private, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Interstellar, and The Martian, a large portion of Damon’s screen time is dedicated to him be saved in one way or another. In Saving Private Ryan, a detachment of soldiers are sent on a harrowing mission to a French village to bring him home, and in Courage Under Fire, the film revolves around Denzel Washington investigating a heroic rescue mission that saved Damon’s life. It may seem cheeky to add Good Will Hunting and The Legend of Bagger Vance, but both of his characters in those films are headed to some dark places before they’re saved by a kind therapist and a mysterious traveler. If he’s rescued once in a film, like Green Zone, The Departed, or Titan A.E., we didn’t consider it to be a dam(on)sel-in-distress film.
Doing the Saving: In Air, he’s tasked with saving Nike’s basketball division, and in The Monuments Men, he’s part of a task force who are saving art during World War II. Toss in Stillwater, Rounders, The Great Wall, and We Bought a Zoo, and you have a plethora of films where Damon is attempting to save people from prison, gambling debt, and monsters. In True Grit, Damon saves Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) from being shot and shortly after helps pull him and Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) out of a snake pit, but they’re small moments in the overall narrative. Thus, we didn’t consider it a “Damon saves” film.
The Odyssey is currently in theaters. Get your tickets here.
