Matt Damon names the “one thing” he can’t stand about Hollywood: “I’m so depressed”
Actors who typically make millions of dollars per picture and supplement their income as producers don’t usually have a lot to complain about, career-wise. And yet, there’s one thing about Hollywood that’s pissed Matt Damon off for years, and continues to do so.
It’s not that he doesn’t have a point, but there is an element of throwing stones in a glass house of his own making, since he’s guilty by association. If he hates it so much, then why did he do it himself? The answer is as a favour for his friends, which also explains around half the credits in his filmography.
Damon owes his entire career to Good Will Hunting, but he owes just as much to The Bourne Identity. By his own admission, Doug Liman’s spy thriller was the film that saved him from falling into obscurity and prevented him from being remembered as a flavour of the month, setting the stage for the next two decades.
Since then, Damon’s path is largely as follows: work with an acclaimed auteur or two for artistic and creative fulfilment, pop up for an uncredited cameo somewhere, headline a mid-to-large budget genre film, play an important role in a star-studded ensemble piece, rinse and repeat. It’s worked, which is why he remains a household name, but he’s been concerned for 10 years that those days are coming to an end.
As far back as 2016, he had a bleak prognosis for the future, and he wasn’t wrong. “I think nowadays I’m so depressed about things because movies have changed since I was where you are,” he told The Tech. “Because of these bigger influences on the business, now they’re making these giant, giant movies that are these $300 million behemoths.”
He singled out the ones that are “all about people in capes running around,” which came before he showed up in Deadpool 2 and Taika Waititi’s two Thor movies, which were coincidentally the three highest-grossing pictures he’d ever been in until Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was released.
“I’d say what irks me the most right now is that the movies that were my bread and butter, the Good Will Hunting-type movies, or The Informant, or movies like that, have just evaporated,” Damon continued. “They’re just gone. They’re not being made anymore. They’re either being made for television, or they have to be made for extremely low budgets.”
Once again revealing himself to be a Boston-born Nostradamus, the Academy Award winner opined that the “one thing that bothers me” about modern cinema is “that the scripts have become so simple, and the stories have become so simple and predictable, and we’re not getting tired of them yet.”
Fast forward to 2026, and Damon played the co-lead and co-produced The Rip alongside Ben Affleck under their Artists Equity banner, a movie that was made under the instruction that the plot be repeated multiple times through dialogue because Netflix knows its subscribers will be using their phones instead of giving a film their complete and undivided attention. Since he couldn’t beat ’em, it looks like he opted to join ’em instead.
