Matt Damon's acting career can be boiled down to one constant: he's always in need of a rescue. Whether he's trapped on foreign soil, beached in another galaxy or stranded on the red planet itself, Damon has made a name for himself by being Hollywood's most handsome distress signal. Saving the actor has become so ridiculous that Quora user Kynan Eng decided to figure out how much all these rescue efforts would actually cost by comparing each film's budget with the real world cash necessary to actually save Damon from these catastrophes
From Saving Private Ryan to The Martian, film budgets for Damon's rescue movies tally up to over $700 million.
However, it's the fictional budget for saving Damon's characters that is most shocking. Figuring out what each rescue mission in each film that Damon has appeared in comes out to more than $900 billion.
That's right: in the fictional world of movies, the world has spent more than $900 billion saving Damon from various scenarios, including his latest movie where he managed to get stranded on Mars.
Here is the breakdown of costs associated with saving the actor's fictional characters:
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
Fictional Cost Estimates
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
The movie production amounts don't include marketing costs, so those numbers are probably higher.
Damon made around $2.7 billion on these films, which is still only about 40 percent of the budget proposed by Mars One to take a trip to the red planet.
Although Damon needed saving again in his most recent theatrical outing, The Martian, it looks like he'll likely do the saving in his next big-budget affair, the fifth Bourne movie: filming for that is already under way. It's scheduled for a July 29, 2016, release date.
"We're, like, probably about halfway through," said Damon to Slash Film. "We started in September but they're going dark for most of December and cutting basically the first two acts. And then we have the third act and then whatever we owe from the first two acts .... We were in Tenerife, which is supposed to be Athens. It would be like a nighttime riot scene to kind of start the movie. And then England, Berlin a little bit for about a week, and a little bit in D.C. Then we're going to Vegas for the third act... Big car chase on the strip."
