It Has Cost Over $900 Million To Save Matt Damon

Over the last few years we’ve seen Matt Damon get himself stuck in numerous cinematic quandaries. In fact, in just the last 18 months alone Damon has needed to be saved from two different planets in Interstellar and The Martian, respectively.

One eagle-eyed Quora user, via Yahoo, noticed that Damon was repeatedly needing to be saved in movies. But they didn’t just stop there. Because, after noticing that Damon was repeatedly being saved, they decided to ask the hypothetical question of, “How much money has been spent attempting to bring Matt Damon back from distant places?” They then posed this question to the Quora community, who have spent the last few months amalgamating all of their answers.

Kynan Eng, a Quora user, decide to break down the answer to this quandary and figured out exactly how much it has cost to bring back the fictional characters that Damon has played. Eng worked out that movies have spent close to a trillion dollars on saving Matt Damon in his various incarnations, starting with Courage Under Fire.

In the 1996 film, directed by Edward Zwick, Matt Damon’s Specialist Ilario was saved in a Gulf War helicopter rescue, which would have come to around $300,000. This was then followed by Saving Private Ryan, in which Matt Damon plays Private First Class James Francis Ryan, the paratrooper that Tom Hanks’ John H. Miller and his military team have to save following the death of his three brothers. According to Eng’s calculations it would have cost Hanks around $100,000 to go deep into Nazi occupied Europe to find Damon’s character.

At this point, things start to get rather expensive. That’s because in Titan A.E. Matt Damon’s character Cale Tucker goes on an intergalactic journey where around $200 billion is spent to help him. Things get a little less expensive with Syriana and Green Zone, where a combined total of around $100,000 was dolled out. This was for the Middle East private security return flight and US Army transport from Middle East, respectively.

But another huge amount was then spent by Matt Damon’s Max Da Costa in 2013’s Elysium, with Eng predicting that around $100 million worth of damage and space station security deployment was needed. At this point you’ll have probably noticed that we’re still quite some way off the $900 billion that was estimated.

Well, Damon’s last two films gobble up that amount very, very, very quickly. The creation of the Interstellar spaceship in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi epic of the same name, which included sending around a dozen astronauts into a black-hole to find new planets for humans to live on as well as a huge ship to follow them, is believed to have cost around $500 billion.

Then, in The Martian, after his character Mark Watney becomes stranded on Mars it’s thought that around $200 billion was then splashed out to bring him back home after her was left behind, assumed dead.

All together this amount comes to over $900 billion, which is a hefty amount to save the Oscar winning screenwriter of Good Will Hunting. And that’s even before people start calculating how much has been spent cleaning up after Jason Bourne’s antics in the Bourne Identity franchise.

[Image via 20th Century Fox]