Here’s how much all those Matt Damon rescue missions would cost
Hint: It’s a lot.
Isn’t it great that everything in the limitless world of cinema is pretend? Characters can spend money here, travel there, do whatever they want regardless of rationality because nothing is real. Us audiences love our castles in the sky, dammit. Can we live delusionally, please?
But someone is here to burst our bubble — or, actually, blow our minds — with sobering insights on fictional costs. As in, how much money did NASA spend to bring Matt Damon’s character home in The Martian? And, while we’re at, how much did it cost every other person, organization or institution to bring Matt Damon back from anywhere in any other applicable movie?
Kynan Eng, a Zurich-based researcher, actually determined the answer to that question. Aside from The Martian, Damon’s resume is loaded with movies where he plays a character that needs saving, and Eng found detailed estimates of how much it cost to retrieve Damon’s characters from whichever corner of the universe he ended up.
In a Quora post, Eng provided the following costs:
Courage Under Fire (Gulf War 1 helicopter rescue): $300,000 Saving Private Ryan (WW2 Europe search party): $100,000 Titan A.E. (Earth evacuation spaceship): $200 billion Syriana (Middle East private security return flight): $50,000 Green Zone (US Army transport from Middle East): $50,000 Elysium (Space station security deployment and damages): $100 million Interstellar (Interstellar spaceship): $500 billion The Martian (Mars mission): $200 billion
In total, that’s $900 billion in fictional money spent rescuing Matt Damon.
Eng told BuzzFeed he “made up’’ the fictional costs, but provided footnotes on his research. For example: “[Damon’s] 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.’’
$2.7 billion? Psh, take it.
The many haircuts of Matt Damon:
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