Matt Damon sure does get around. Picture: Aidan Monaghan
WHILE politicians are criticised for splashing out on travel, there’s one man who would put the Bronwyn Bishops of the world to shame with the amount it would take to rescue his backside with a helicopter.
His name is Matt Damon.
In a post that’s gone viral on Quora, an engineer calculated it would cost more than $1 trillion ($US900 billion) ferrying Damon’s characters around the cosmos throughout his Hollywood career.
The biggest expense would be rescuing characters played by the actor from far-flung locations like the Middle East, Mars, and a distant galaxy only accessible through a wormhole.
Engineer Kynan Eng did the sums, calculating how much each trip or rescue mission depicted in Damon’s films would have cost in real life, adjusted for inflation.
Incidentally, the combined cost of actually making the films was just over $1 billion ($US729 million).
1. Courage Under Fire (Gulf War 1 helicopter rescue): $425,690 ($US300,000)
2. Saving Private Ryan (WW2 Europe search party): $141,900 ($US100,000)
Saving Private Ryan (1998) is the quintessential Matt Damon rescue film.Source:News Limited
3. Titan AE (Earth evacuation spaceship): $283,790 ($US200,000)
4. Syriana (Middle East private security return flight): $70,950 ($US50,000)
5. Green Zone (US Army transport from Middle East): $70,950 ($US50,000)
When Damon filmed 2010 offering Green Zone, his action-packed globe trotting was just getting started.Source:Supplied
6. Elysium (Space station security deployment and damages): $141,900 ($US100,000)
7. Interstellar (Spaceship): $709 billion ($US500 billion)
8. The Martian (Mars mission): $284 billion ($US200 billion)
Damon is pictured, with director Ridley Scott, filming The Martian on location in Jordan, which is much cheaper to fly to than Mars. Picture: Aidan MonaghanSource:Supplied
TOTAL: $1.3 TRILLION ($US900 BILLION)
Unsurprisingly, those films in which Damon was rescued from outer space were the most expensive.
In a separate blog post, Eng explained his calculations, which took such costs as “terraforming a new Earth-like planet” in the 2000 animated film Titan AE.
He said he had answered the Matt Damon question on Quora as a joke I “because I thought it was a funny question”.
“All of the Matt Damon rescue missions relate to military and/or space activities,” he wrote.
“Most of the military cost estimates are based on published costs of private jet charter flights. But these don’t really matter for the overall cost — what makes up the vast bulk of the $900 billion estimate — are three space films.”
In Interstellar, Eng used the $213 billion ($US150 billion) international space station as a reference.
“The Endurance has 12 modules while the ISS has about 15, so they are of roughly similar internal volume,” he wrote.
“Also, the launch craft seems to be similar to the NASA Space Launch System, so the cost of getting stuff into space is probably similar to what it is now.”
But, he argued, the Endurance’s mission would have been significantly more expensive because of the distance it travelled.
In The Martian, Eng said, Matt Damon’s character travelled on board a craft that was similar to the ISS, with “a number of extra cool features such as the rotating section to produce artificial gravity”.
He admitted that, “since the whole Mars mission was not really a Matt Damon rescue”, he technically should have calculated this small part of the film as a proportion of the overall cost. But “that makes for a boring headline, so we’ll ignore it.”
Either way, the cost of the Mars mission appears to have been well worth it.
The Martian has proven to be director Ridley Scott’s biggest hit ever, taking in more than $709 billion at the box office — along with winning Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy and Best Actor at this year’s Academy Awards.
The Quora post caught the eye of Damon himself, who conceded Eng’s point on theToday show — although he protested that $709 billion was a ridiculous amount for his brief appearance in Interstellar.
“It’s just for a cameo,” Damon laughed.
If someone could figure out how many frequent flyer points the actor would have clocked up on these trips, that would be excellent.
Related Quora question-and-answer posts include:
■ How much would it realistically cost to build an Imperial I-Class Star Destroyer?
■ What was it like to be at Harvard with Matt Damon?
■ What parts of the technology/story in The Martian aren’t possible with today’s technology?
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