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This is the best Boston movie, according to Boston.com readers
The winner of our Massachusetts Movie Madness bracket was the film everyone expected to win, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's "Good Will Hunting."
We have a winner.
After ten days and nearly 10,000 votes, Boston.com readers have crowned “Good Will Hunting” the champion of our Massachusetts Movie Madness bracket.
Almost 30 years after Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s movie made the Cambridge natives into household names, “Good Will Hunting” outlasted three Best Picture Oscar winners, blockbusters that earned hundreds of millions of dollars, and movies Damon and Affleck directed or produced like “The Town” and “Manchester by the Sea.”
Are you disappointed “Jaws” or “The Departed” couldn’t topple the most famous alums of Cambridge Rindge & Latin? To quote Dr. Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), it’s not your fault.
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We’ve asked readers about their favorite Boston movies before, and they’ve picked “Good Will Hunting” every single time. In 2021, it received 43 percent of the vote in a poll asking readers to name the best Boston movie, with no other film breaking 25 percent.
At least “Jaws” kept it close in our bracket, losing in the finals to “Good Will Hunting” 57 percent to 43 percent.
Why is it that “Good Will Hunting” endures when so many other films that were classics in their era have faded from the public consciousness? In some ways, it’s as much about the story on screen as it is the story of two local boys who made good.
Damon and Affleck spent years developing and shopping a script that began as Damon’s class project at Harvard. At almost every studio they visited, they were laughed out of the building when they insisted on starring in the film. The film’s original studio, Castle Rock, wanted to shoot in Canada instead of Boston to save money.
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And when director Gus Van Sant and jailed film executive Harvey Weinstein fought for months over the film’s final cut, Damon and Affleck moved back to Davis Square in Somerville, nearly broke and unsure if their film would ever see the light of day.
The only remotely similar story to “Good Will Hunting” in recent Hollywood history is that of “Rocky,” whose star Sylvester Stallone wrote his own screenplay and rejected six-figure deals from studios that wouldn’t let him star in it. Now there’s a statue of Rocky Balboa in Philadelphia.
It speaks to the legacy of “Good Will Hunting” that a statue dedicated to the film seems entirely possible. Maybe a monument to Robin Williams in the Public Garden, if Matt Damon has his way.
After hearing from readers over the last ten days about what “Good Will Hunting” means to them, let’s end this contest with quotes from the stars themselves, courtesy Boston Magazine’s oral history of the film.
“It’s amazing how often people come up to you in airports and on streets and start talking about it and say, “I see it at least once a year,” or “I’ve seen it 30 times.” It’s a film that people carry around with them.” — Stellan Skarsgard
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“I think it’s a movie that people experienced. It’s more than a movie for some people, which is kind of wonderful.” — Robin Williams
“When I look at my own career, my life, […] it’s all rooted in this experience.” — Ben Affleck
“I don’t think there could ever be another movie that I felt that way about. Because of what it meant for our lives, because of that time in our life. Another movie couldn’t occupy that much of my heart and soul at this point in my life. A movie could never change my life like that again.” — Matt Damon
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