Saving Matt Damon Has Cost Billions, But ‘The Martian’ May Be Damon’s Last Vulnerable Role

Matt Damon has been saved countless times in his movie roles and has been the hero, only a few. It has recently been discovered that the unrealistic costs of the “saving Matt Damon” missions, like those in Saving Private Ryan, Elysium, and the latest Matt Damon film, The Martian, is much greater than the films suggest. In fact, if Matt Damon needed to be saved in real life, it’s more likely that he would simply be left behind.

Saving Matt Damon from earth is much cheaper, based on the recent data, but the missions are still always very expensive. The helicopter rescue in the 1996 film Courage Under Fire is estimated to cost $300,000. The search party that traveled to save Matt Damon’s fictional character, Private Ryan, after WW2 in Europe was estimated to cost $100,000. Damon’s latest film, in which a team must travel back to Mars to rescue Matt Damon yet again, is estimated to cost $200 billion. If these costs are beginning to sound cheap to you, that’s because they are.

Altogether, saving Matt Damon throughout his movie history costed $900 billion, but these are only fictional costs, according to USA Today. The 1969 voyage to the moon, known as the Apollo 11 mission, cost the United States government $355 million. The distance to the moon from Earth is only 238,900 miles, but to Mars, it’s 33.9 million miles. So, it appears that if Matt Damon really got left behind during a mission to Mars, it would cost much more than the estimated $200 billion to save him. Despite the reality of the costs associated with saving Matt Damon and the fact that most people are fed up with the plot of saving him, the actor has admitted his appreciation for his stranded, captured, and left behind characters.

In a September interview with the Telegraph, Damon spoke about how actors are not always able to play the characters the dream of playing, which in Matt’s case is the daring, hero character. However, just to get his “bread and butter,” Matt Damon accepted the movie roles in which his character needed to be saved with the hopes that it would keep him relevant in Hollywood and open doors for the roles he really wanted.

“It’s incalculable how much these movies have helped my career. Suddenly it put me on a short list of people who could get movies made and so directors called me and that’s the best part of it. But another benefit has been that I have been able to do films that had wonderful scripts but on the face of it were not going to be box office successes like Syriana, The Departed and The Good Shepherd. I had the luxury of jumping on all three of them because I knew I was going to have another chance to do the Bourne character.”

Matt Damon’s upcoming films offer a bit variety for his fans, as now Matt will have the opportunity to play the hero. The upcoming historical action film, The Great Wall, stars Matt Damon, who works with an elite team to help the Chinese fight off a threatening enemy. Also coming in 2017, Matt Damon will work alongside Reese Witherspoon in the film Downsizing. In the new film, an Omaha man is shrunken to join a colony of tiny people, but it has not yet been revealed if real life humans will be forced to dish out millions of dollars to once again save Matt Damon.

Matt still remains optimistic about his career in the possibility that The Great Wall will not be his only big hero film, and saving Matt Damon might be a thing of the past. In the Telegraph interview, Damon revealed that in Hollywood, his career could go either way.

“I’ve been around long enough to fall in and out of favor. It’s been instructional.”

See AMC video on Matt Damon’s upcoming film.

[Photo by Eamon M. McCormack/Stringer/Getty Images]