Hollywood Has Spent Way Too Much Money Retrieving Matt Damon.

In The Martian, Matt Damon gets his ass to Mars, then gets it stuck there–a bit of a bad habit of Matty’s, at least according to this Quora post on the amount of fictional money spent rescuing characters played by Damon over the years ($900 billion dollars in change! You are one expensive damsel, Matt).

Over on Quora, Kynan Eng estimates the fictional cost, in 2015 currency, of Matt Damon’s many ill-fated trips:

Courage Under Fire (Gulf War 1 helicopter rescue): $300k
Saving Private Ryan (WW2 Europe search party): $100k
Titan AE (Earth evacuation spaceship): $200B
Syriana (Middle East private security return flight): $50k
Green Zone (US Army transport from Middle East): $50k
Elysium (Space station security deployment and damages): $100m
Interstellar (Interstellar spaceship): $500B
The Martian (Mars mission): $200B
TOTAL: $900B plus change

Eng also compiled the actual budgets for each of those Imperiled Damon films:

Movie Budgets
Courage under Fire: $46m
Saving Private Ryan: $70m
Titan AE: $75m
Syriana: $50m
Green Zone: $100m
Elysium: $115m
Interstellar: $165m
The Martian: $108m
TOTAL: $729m

Marketing costs are not included in those budgets.

Regardless of Matt Damon’s track record this year with social justice issues, I like his body of work just fine. I’m a pretty big fan of some movies in the Endangered Damon genre! But seeing all those thematically similar films listed one after another does make me think about the overwhelming ubiquity of white male protagonists, and the frequency with which thrillers and adventure movies use women and people of color as props to tell the hero’s story. Considering there’s no shortage of “Handsome White Dude Bravely Faces Danger” movies, I just think it would be interesting to see Hollywood spending money (fictitious and not) to save someone else for a change.

But who can resist rescuing this mug, I guess?

(via Mediaite)

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Carolyn Cox