How Much Money Did It Cost To Save Matt Damon In The Movies?

By Peter ScirettaDec. 28, 2015 10:30 am EST

Over the last two decades, Hollywood has saved Matt Damon from a variety of precarious situations, from an exhaustive European search during World War II (Saving Private Ryan) to his most recent rescue mission from Mars (The Martian). How much money did it cost to save Matt Damon's characters in movies? Find out after the jump.

The question was posed on the social question and answer site Quora.com (via David Chen). Kynan Eng attempted to answer the query as accurately as possible. The movies in question include Courage under Fire, Saving Private Ryan, Titan AE, Syriana, Green Zone, Elysium, Interstellar and The Martian. Eng attempted to calculate the estimated fictional costs where Matt Damon has been sent on extended "business trips" and here are the figures he came to (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

The grand total comes to slightly more than $900 Billion dollars. That's quite a lot of money to spend on one man over 19 years of movies, right? Eng adds that making the Matt Damon movies has cost about 0.1% of the "real" cost to actually send him on all of these business trips and that 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." The ratio of fictional/real costs is 1234.5679. You can read the entire answer over at Quora, which also includes the estimated financial figures for how much all of the above movies cost to make.