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More than $900 billion has been spent saving Matt Damon

Updated Dec 28th, 2015 11:28AM EST
How Much Money Does Matt Damon Cost
Image: Fox

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I’m not sure there’s an actor in the history of cinema that has required more saving than Matt Damon. I’d never really noticed it before, but one astute Quora user posed a hysterical hypothetical question to the community earlier this year that was more interesting than I ever imagined: “How much money has been spent attempting to bring Matt Damon back from distant places?”

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That’s the kind of question so incredible that I didn’t even need an answer to squeeze some enjoyment from it. But here’s the thing — I got an answer anyway. Quora user Kynan Eng decided to break the question down in terms of both actual, real-life movie budgets and the estimated costs of bringing the fictional characters played by Damon home.

Here’s what he came up with:

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

Fictional Costs
[My estimates, costs are in 2015 currency]
Courage Under Fire (Gulf War 1 helicopter rescue): $300k
Saving Private Ryan (WW2 Europe search party): $100k
Titan A.E. (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

Nearly a trillion dollars to save various incarnations of Matt Damon. That’s a significant percentage of the U.S. national debt. At least we know that Matt Damon will be doing the saving when he returns as Jason Bourne in 2016.

Jacob Siegal
Jacob Siegal Associate Editor

Jacob Siegal is Associate Editor at BGR, having joined the news team in 2013. He has over a decade of professional writing and editing experience, and helps to lead our technology and entertainment product launch and movie release coverage.