The Matt Damon movie that killed an entire studio: “It’s a daring storyline”
Every high-profile actor will star in at least one abysmal flop during their career, whether that’s critically, commercially, or both. However, not many have the misfortune of taking top billing in a film that fails so spectacularly that it kills an entire studio, but it happened to Matt Damon once.
There’s no way to predict which pictures will sink or swim, and while there are countless bombs every year, studio-destroying undertakings are rare. Less so in the modern era, to be fair, but nobody can be guaranteed safe from accidentally lending their name to something that hammers that last nail into the coffin.
James Stewart is one of Hollywood’s most iconic stars and an icon of the industry’s ‘Golden Age’, but his post-World War II comeback, It’s a Wonderful Life, was the death knell for Liberty Films. Nicolas Cage’s Bangkok Dangerous led to Virtual Studios’ folding, Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire sank Samuel Bronston Productions, and the star-studded Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within doomed Square Pictures.
It takes a confluence of factors to make any movie a hit, but it takes significantly fewer to render one a disaster. In Damon’s case, the formula was simple; a studio spent a lot of money on a production, it didn’t come anywhere close to making those costs back, and it was decided that the best option on the table was for the company responsible to permanently close its doors.
Not that it was his fault, though, even if he did play the main character. Sandwiched in between The Talented Mr Ripley and The Legend of Bagger Vance in his filmography, 2000’s Titan AE was the second theatrically released feature from Fox Animation Studios after Anastasia, which recouped its budget almost three times over, so there was no reason to suspect it would be a catastrophe.
Damon’s Cale Tucker is a plucky would-be adventurer tasked with saving humanity, defending the titular spaceship against intergalactic threats, especially the aliens who’ve destroyed Earth, sending him and a ragtag crew on a race against time to locate the craft before it falls into enemy hands.
Originally intended as a live-action sci-fi blockbuster, Titan AE pivoted to animation, which may not have been the right call in retrospect. “It’s a daring storyline,” he told Variety in 1997. “The imagery would be too costly to realise in live-action. It will distinguish this film, which has a cast not only of humans but also aliens. And the group of actors we’ve put together is about the finest assembled for an animated film.”
That cast also included Bill Pullman, Drew Barrymore, Nathan Lane, John Leguizamo, and Ron Perlman, all of whom, just like Damon, couldn’t do a damn thing to stop the movie from being declared dead on arrival. On June 26th, 2000, a mere ten days after Titan AE had been released on the big screen, the announcement was made that Fox Animation Studios was no more.
20th Century Fox could have weathered a flop of that magnitude, but its subsidiary could not. While the film has become something of a cult favourite among animation aficionados, its real lasting legacy is being the first official entry in cinema’s most specific subgenre: Matt Damon needing rescued from outer space.
