“It was a huge bomb”: Matt Damon bet his future on one movie and ended up with nothing
The more successful an actor becomes, the more people they’ll have whispering in their ear, trying to influence their career. Matt Damon didn’t have anything the first time it happened to him, though, and he ended up with even less because of it.
Agents, managers, publicists, friends, and family all think they have a stake in what their client, buddy, or relative does next, but sometimes, it’s best to block out the noise. Damon was nowhere near established, or even remotely well-known, when he decided to bet everything he had on what he was told was a sure thing.
Obviously, it was not a sure thing, and having started at square one, he hadn’t moved anywhere. To add insult to injury, the whispers in his ear were so strong that he’d opted to abandon his education in favour of being anointed as a fast-rising movie star, so it might have even been a step backwards.
On the plus side, Damon’s short-lived time as a student at Harvard did come in mighty handy when he and Ben Affleck were writing the Good Will Hunting script, which did eventually get him over the line when their Academy Award win for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ strapped a rocket to their backs.
For years previously, he had every right to believe he was onto a winner. With The Warriors, 48 Hrs, and Red Heat director Walter Hill at the helm, and a cast that saw Oscar-winning heavyweights Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall lending support to Wes Studi’s title character, 1993’s Geronimo: An American Legend was Damon’s highest-profile gig yet.
He was only one semester short of finishing his Harvard degree, but landing a supporting role in a big-budget historical epic convinced him, with a little nudge from several others, that there wasn’t much risk in ditching his education to focus on his acting career, when he was perfectly primed to take off.
“Everyone told me Geronimo was going to be a huge, huge hit, and the best thing I could do for my career would be to stay in Los Angeles and keep pounding the pavement, because when it opened, everything was going to explode,” he recalled, only for the opposite to be true.
“It was a huge bomb,” he accurately noted. “And I found myself stuck in LA with no money.” His Geronimo was declared dead on arrival, and after two weeks, it had completely vanished from the box office top ten. Damon was fucked, basically, and he had to claw his way back to relevance all over again.
Hill was convinced that counter-programming was at least partially to blame, with a made-for-TV movie called Geronimo premiering on December 5th, 1993, five days before his feature hit the big screen. Since millions of viewers had already seen the same story less than a week beforehand, there wasn’t much point in paying for a ticket to repeat it. That, and the fact it wasn’t very good.
