ESC

So… How Much Has Been Spent Saving Matt Damon?

We all have different ways of spending our time. I tend to get too high, binge watch a show I’ve seen half a dozen times already and f**k some guy who doesn’t deserve the brilliance that is my vagina, but Kynan Yang likes to spend his time calculating how much money has been spent in an effort to keep Matt Damon alive.

The man, Australian-to-Zurich transplant is an artificial intelligence researcher. So I trust everything he’s ever said. For Christ’s sake, he’s a scientist! Over 7 movies and 19 years, the whopping total is:

A Guy Calculated How Much Money Has Been Spent Saving Matt Damon

Surprisingly low… I mean it’s Matt Damon. The list does not include Good Will Hunting, which seems like an oversight. What about all the time and resources invested into the Matt Damon then?

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 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 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

Notes

  • Movie marketing costs are not included
  • Only movies where Matt Damon acted are included
  • Making the Matt Damon movies has cost about 0.1% of the “real” cost to actually send him on all of these business trips
  • His movie gross takings so far are about $2.7B, which is about 40% of the cheapest proposed trip to Mars, as proposed by the Mars One team.

Anyway, obviously Eng, the scientist, used a very complex algorithm completely unknown to the layman. Right? This massive number wasn’t just pulled out of thin air right? But no, he confesses that they’re all made up. Rough estimates adjusted for inflation. From Eng:

This is not real research in the sense that I know it. It would be nice to get this type of coverage for my real work.

Me too, but people will always care about Matt Damon more than a cool robot. I remember Matt Damon but I forget about that cool robot I saw on the front page of Reddit.

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