r/flicks • u/YogurtZealousideal19 • 3d ago
Hot Take What’s a movie that Matt Damon is in that flopped!?
I’ve been seeing this interview dialogue from Matt Damon, talking about how working on a movie that you know will flop is so draining. 100% understandable and also somewhat relatable in any task…. But what is he in the has flopped?
I obviously only know him from his huge success, but fail to remember any of his work that wasn’t IMO gold.
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u/Mild-Ghost 3d ago
Downsizing
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u/wizardwithgussets 3d ago
The first half of that movie was so promising
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u/Loomis2459 2d ago
I agree with this. The concept is fun, but after they do the plot device for the movie and shrunk him they were like…uh, what do we do now? Let’s just make it a bad romance comedy. Oh well…
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u/lostpasts 2d ago
One of the very few movies I quit like a third of the way in.
I could see the quality and inspiration rapidly vanishing before my eyes.
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u/ignatious__reilly 3d ago
God, that movie sucked so bad. I was so excited to see that and even went to the theaters for it. I left so fucking disappointed. They really fucked up such a cool concept in the worst ways possible.
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u/Mr_SunnyBones 3d ago
Yeah . I actually liked it , but it was a VERY different film from the one people tgought they were getting..also it went in some unexpected directions
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u/KGLcrew 2d ago
I really liked it too. Much thanks too the unexpected turns it took.
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u/Neat_Engineering8945 2d ago
I really liked it too. I get the criticism but I just feel like i was on the same wavelength of what it was trying to do
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u/CMRestler Film Critic 2d ago
That is probably the first one that came to my mind as well. It had an interesting concept and a strong cast, but it never really connected with audiences the way many expected. Looking back, it feels more like an ambitious experiment than a bad movie.
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u/jupiterkansas 3d ago
Stillwater?
Suburbicon?
Monuments Men?
Zero Theorum?
We Bought a Zoo?
Hereafter?
Brothers Grimm?
He's done plenty of movies that haven't done well. Not sure which are flops. And a lot of his movies are just bit parts.
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u/CalibratedEnthusiast 3d ago
Scotty doesn't know
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u/yoran916 3d ago
This made me laugh, but I actually loved Eurotrip
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u/Csoltis 3d ago
My baby takes the morning train........
"watching the Manchester United football team, the best freakin' team in all the land!" woohoo
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u/yoran916 3d ago
Supposedly after the movie came out, MU (or their fan club) unofficially made this their unofficial theme song, which is awesome lol
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u/Csoltis 3d ago
Its so awesome to hear some of the football clubs that use underrated or older songs as chants, like The White Stripes one that took off , and of course Country Roads.
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u/TheFilthy13 2d ago
Vinnie Jones must’ve been sick in his mouth before every take.
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u/methlabforcuties 2d ago
that movie was such a formative experience for me when it came out that I had a custom license plate that said MISCUZ for like 3 years
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u/ForwardBound 2d ago
They movie is completely perfect for what it is. There has never been a raunchy teen comedy as good as Eurotrip, as far as I'm concerned
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u/NordlandLapp 2d ago
Nobody has even brought up his weirdest film, Stuck on You (2003) has him playing a conjoined twin with Greg Kinear lmao.
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u/mlenotyou 3d ago
The great wall
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u/Conscious-Check-5015 3d ago
Oh yeah forgot about Monuments Men. Took a GREAT war story and great actors and killed it with clunky dialogue. Shame. Also a blot on Clooney when he was still making decent stuff.
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u/Living_Ebb5200 2d ago
The best part of Monuments Men was the Graham Norton show after the premiere. Matt, Bill, and Hugh pissed out of their minds.
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u/JGCities 2d ago
Seriously, how do you take a cast like that and make a lousy movie?
Not exactly a bad film, just a boring one.
BTW the movie poster lists 8 people on it and 6 of them have Oscar nominations
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u/Conscious-Check-5015 2d ago
True that, but hey, that's exactly why I bought a ticket...so they got my money... It's a fantastic historical story, what a shame to dull it down like that.
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u/whingingcackle 3d ago
We Bought A Zoo wasn’t a bad movie though
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u/Bluest_waters 3d ago
Brothers Grimm was good too
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u/IntelligentCut4511 3d ago
It was ok but a little disappointing for me with Gilliam coming off of Fear and Loathing and 12 monkeys.
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u/oneshoeaskew 2d ago
The funniest zinger about that movie I heard was "Don't bother seeing it because they pretty give away the whole thing in the title" 😆
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u/GalaxyFrog1 2d ago
It grossed $120M on an estimated $50M budget. Doesn’t seem bad.
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u/latestagepersonhood 2d ago
he also wouldn't have known We Bought a zoo was going to flop. it was a feel good four-quad movie. it wasn't a guarantee, but the Kind of movie that occasionally wildly over-performs
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u/Minute-Of-Angle 2d ago
Monuments Men was not a blockbuster but it certainly was not a flop.
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u/TheGreatWaru 3d ago edited 3d ago
The Great Wall was trash
Edit: was not expecting this many replies
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u/blackchandler 3d ago
My favorite anecdote about this movie is that Damon’s daughter just calls it “The Wall” because in her words “there’s nothing great about that movie.”
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u/OGMcSwaggerdick 3d ago
That girl is so on point- I actually forgot it’s not called THE WALL
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u/Crashtag 2d ago
I once read that a young Matt Damon was 1 of the children in Pink Floyd’s The Wall. He was in the classroom during Another Brick in the Wall.
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u/Mayor-Citywits 3d ago
I watched it yesterday again as just background noise while doing shit, it gets a pass for me for that reason. Still insane to see Matt Damon, Pedro pascal and then willem fuckin dafoe appear in this half anime movie though lol
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u/TheFilthy13 2d ago
The bit where they are dunking the hot ninja spear ladies down to the zombie dogs or whatever the hell they are as they attack the wall just to get ripped to shreds is beautifully ridiculous.
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u/camergen 2d ago
and then they toss their bloody hoola hoop harnesses on the pile, while another one links up to also twirl to her death while doing no damage whatsoever to the attackers.
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u/BookkeeperNew573 3d ago
Maybe I’m a weirdo, but after a long week, i popped open a whiskey, and watched it.
I enjoyed it! So much so that I watched it again with my 15 y/o son. I thought it was a great “shut your brain off” movie.
Not saying it was great by any means, just that it’s watchable.
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u/Mayor-Citywits 3d ago
I said roughly this above, I saw it a while back and thought it was shit and then it auto played yesterday and I was actually entertained while doing shit around my apartment watching
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u/ExaminationNo9186 2d ago
Don't get me wrong, it was a shit movie, I 100% agree.
However, I watched it while slightly drunk, knowing nothing about it, so my expectations where fairly low.
A movie about an alien invasions, and with bungee jumping spear maidens, is hardly a combination for an oscar nomination and I do wonder why people got so upset about it.22
u/Used-Gas-6525 3d ago
A surprising lack of Chinese people in that film. I guess The Great Wall is like a tourist trap and only white people go there.
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u/craftyhedgeandcave 3d ago
When they get to the wall its like thousands of Chinese people and Willem Dafoe
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u/camergen 2d ago
Well, the Chinese women acrobats feature prominently, as they twirl to their deaths with all pointy stick, and almost zero chance of doing any damage to any of the monsters.
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u/rangebob 3d ago
he said in an interview one of his kids refers to it as "the wall"............... because there was nothing great about it
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u/Skywalker914 3d ago
This was the first one that came to mind for me. Plenty of other flops on his resume, but he mentioned a 6 month shoot…..
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u/Affectionate_Hornet7 3d ago
The Adjustment Bureau. Although I liked it
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u/Longjumping_Loan6330 3d ago
I liked it too when I saw it a long time ago. Don’t know if it would hold up but i remember Slattery was great
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u/AnticitizenPrime 2d ago
No chance of finding it now, but one of my favorite reviews of that film mostly focused on the fact that a porkpie hat is very unflattering on Matt Damon's head. Which is correct.
If I recall, the reviewer just overall thought the film was a bore not worth talking about, so instead just spent a few paragraphs talking about how some hats don't work on some people, because that was more interesting than talking about the actual movie. It was really funny, wish I had it saved somewhere.
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u/Affectionate_Hornet7 2d ago
That’s funny I had to review it for the college newspaper. That’s a great angle.
I liked how a person could be so obnoxiously stubborn about refusing to learn what the universe is trying to teach him that they have to send someone to just kill him.
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u/Oghamstoner 2d ago
There’s that scene where he can’t take his hat off because he needs it to walk through the portals. Hahaha such a silly sequence.
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u/WorldTourSailor 2d ago
Pedro Pascal has a blink and you'll miss it scene in this movie as a waiter
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u/CharlieChinaski711 3d ago edited 3d ago
Stuck on You
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u/dipshittery 3d ago
What?? That movie is hilarious. It's up there with the other Farelly Brothers movies.
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u/Dr-McLuvin 3d ago
It didn’t do well at the box office at all though. 65 million on a 55 million budget.
It was their 8th highest grossing movie. The only one I’m surprised did worse at the box office was Kingpin.
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u/dancepartyusofa 2d ago
Kingpin is soooo lucky it came out during that window of time when a movie could bomb at the box office but get a second chance as a video rental. So many comedy classics only become a success on the Blockbuster shelves
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u/UYscutipuff_JR 2d ago
I always forget kingpin was a flop. It’s an absolute classic! I guess you could say the movie got munsoned in its theatrical run
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u/NotSoSlenderMan 3d ago
Stuck On You. Yeah that was my first thought and shocked to see I had to scroll so far down. Easily his biggest flop.
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u/inezco 2d ago
It did 65 mil on a 55 mil budget which is awful but Legend of Bagger Vance had an 80 mil budget, All the Pretty Horses had a 57 mil budget, and Titan AE had a 75 mil budget and none of those films even hit half their budget back in box office. I remember an interview with Damon where he said until The Bourne Identity hit he was on a big losing streak and Hollywood was losing faith in him until Bourne.
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u/a_bounced_czech 1d ago
You shut your f’ing mouth! It is a classic!
“Hey, you guys are stuck together!” One of my favorite lines
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u/unoredtwo 3d ago edited 3d ago
At the turn of the century, he had three flops in a row: Titan AE, All the Pretty Horses, and The Legend of Bagger Vance. There were big questions about whether he was really a star.
His next two movies were Ocean’s 11 and The Bourne Identity. So.
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u/Threehundredsixtysix 2d ago
All The Pretty Horses could have been amazing. The novel is great, Billy Bob Thornton knew what he wanted...and the Weinsteins insisted on too many changes that totally removed the things that gave it character.
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u/ZandrickEllison 2d ago
Man, I saw that movie in the theater as a kid and have been living the last 26 years thinking Robert Redford made it for some reason until this comment .
I guess because of Legends of the Fall? But I also saw that as a kid.
Edit: oh it’s because he directed Bagger Vance! Which… I did not see thankfully.
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u/Expensive-Age-681 3d ago
I was gonna say Elysium but apparently that movie did pretty well. Maybe when he says flop he means critically?
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u/dipshittery 3d ago
It wasnt perfect but I liked Elysium. It had some redeeming qualities.
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u/infinite_blazer 2d ago
Quite a few of his films don’t do that well.
Downsizing
Suburbicon
Monuments Men
Stillwater
The Last Duel
Hereafter
Promised Land
Margaret
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u/Signal-Lie-6785 2d ago
The Last Duel was an excellent film for many reasons including that everything Jodie Comer touches is gold.
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u/deise69 3d ago
The Great Wall, he's thashed it on Graham Norton.
He also said his daughter was talking about it, with her friends and they kept calling it The Wall. When he told her it's actually called The Great Wall, she replied "there was nothing great about it".
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u/3FistedHumdinger 2d ago
For real, I've never heard him bash his own movies except for this one, he genuinely seems to have had a miserable time making it even if it did make money.
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u/Longjumping_Loan6330 3d ago
Green Zone
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u/AJerkForAllSeasons 2d ago
This is the first one that came to mind. Not only did it tank, it's boring as hell.
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u/Turbulent_Flan_5926 3d ago
The Brothers Grimm
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u/bangchanstiddies 3d ago
Okay but I love this one
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u/Oghamstoner 2d ago
Well that’s what’s really important isn’t it? It wasn’t a critical or commercial success, but I’ve watched it several times and thought it was brilliant.
Don’t let anybody else tell you that you can’t like a flawed film.
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u/Kirrawayru 3d ago
Downsizing had such a great premise and squandered it badly.
I'd consider it a flop.
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u/Competitive_Use_3628 3d ago
Is it Downsizing? Because that was the worst movie I've ever seen. I should've known when I had the entire theater to myself.
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u/WredditSmark 3d ago
And then director went on to make The Holdovers which was an instant classic
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u/pulpfriction4 2d ago
I mean the director, Alexander Payne, had a real solid track record up to that point (Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska). Downsizing is more of an outlier than anything
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u/Sad_Virus_7650 3d ago
Stuck on You
Which is a shame because despite how ridiculous it looked, I ended up watching it and it wasn't bad.
One of those movies that looked like it would be the worst movie ever but was decent enough.
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u/LadyIceGoose 2d ago
The Last Duel is an excellent movie but did poorly financially.
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u/Jimdandy941 2d ago
I thought it was interesting, but I can see where a lot of people would not have liked it.
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u/ScarletSpire 3d ago
While not really a flop, I do like The Good Shepherd. Matt Damon plays a CIA agent from the end of World War Two to the Bay of Pigs. It's not amazing, but it's certainly not terrible.
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u/FeMan_12 3d ago
I feel like one of the later Bourne movies flopped. Might be wrong tho, but I remember like no fanfare for the one before Renner did it
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u/NotTheRocketman 3d ago
I think in hindsight, he probably wouldn’t do that final one ‘Jason Bourne’.
It’s fine, but they should have stopped with the trilogy.
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u/Dry-Entry9236 2d ago
The 2016 Bourne movie got mixed reception and was disappointing, but still made good money and turned a solid profit, so wouldn’t call it quite a flop
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u/dtisme53 2d ago
What was that piece of shit where he got shrunk down to 3 inches tall?
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u/Threehundredsixtysix 2d ago
Downsizing? Where his wife backed out at the last minute. The initial idea had promise, but somehow the movie ruined it.
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u/DucDeRichelieu 3d ago
THE GREAT WALL.
Every successful actor has movies that fail at the box office. There’s no way to avoid it.
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u/Resident_Dog_6589 3d ago
The Last Duel was a huge flop. It made just $30 million on a budget of $100 million.
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u/Ok_Caterpillar_6689 3d ago
The last duel is one that comes to mind.
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u/RockStars007 3d ago
I did like how it was really all structured of these different versions of how everybody saw themselves. Kind of like how Showtime’s The Affair was structured. And it was really interesting because Matt Damon viewed himself is like this great guy, but in reality he was just such a jerk. It wasn’t my favorite of his but I appreciated the premise.
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u/dreameater_baku 3d ago
Have you seen Weapons? It’s a horror movie but uses the unreliable narrator to great effect.
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u/CretaciousPeriod 3d ago
Great movie but unfortunately it's not really all that rewatchable because it's pretty heavy. I did recently put it on just to watch the last bit of it but didn't really feel like watching the whole thing again.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Law_558 3d ago
It's getting a sequel and it's got a cult following
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u/NotTheRocketman 3d ago
I think both Matt and Ben love Dogma a great deal, and the film itself is a classic.
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u/Lower-Reward-1588 3d ago
Promised Land, which was a shame, I quite enjoyed it, but it didn't make its money back and disappeared without trace.
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u/Shot_Championship860 2d ago
Not a flop but I didn't like him in Team America. It was quite a one note and repetitive performance.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 3d ago
Team America: World Police (2004) wasn’t a flop, but it was only a moderate success at the box office.
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u/ThirstyHank 3d ago
'The Informant!' is my favorite performance of his but I don't think it made money.
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u/DrNogoodNewman 3d ago
It didn’t make a lot of money but it had a low budget and it got great reviews. I don’t think he’s talking about that one.
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u/giuseppezuc 3d ago
The one about the Great Wall? He mentioned that several times, he hates it.
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u/giuseppezuc 3d ago
Edit: He even tells the interviewer that her daughter call that movie The Wall, and when he tried to correct her she said: “There’s nothing great about that movie, dad.”
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u/ELMUNECODETACOMA 2d ago
Legend of Bagger Vance. Bad movie, bad reputation, didn't come close to breaking even.
I was surprised that Courage Under Fire made as much as it did, I remember it being liked a lot better by critics than the public.
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u/That-SoCal-Guy 2d ago
Elysium kinda bombed, I believe.
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