How One Terrible Movie Almost Ruined Matt Damon

for about 10 seconds from when I pull up to the curb when I get to your door

Because I think maybe I'll get up there and I'll knock on the door and you won't be there. This is Good Will Hunting. Written by and starring high school best friends Matt Damon

and Ben Affleck, it was the launching pad for two of the most recognizable talents in Hollywood

history. However, each of these heartthrobs took very different paths to superstardom once they had

their foot in the door. The wilderness that is Hollywood can be a cruel and unforgiving place

and one bad step can stop your career dead in its tracks

And that's exactly what nearly happened for Matt Damon. One bizarre, big budget bomb almost ended it all

I have, there's one movie I did that's not very good, and it's called The Great Wall

Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, Damon and Affleck took drastically different paths after their Oscar-winning breakout hit

Affleck, who played second fiddle in Good Will Hunting, made a concerted effort to appear

in as many big budget blockbusters as possible. He popped up in Armageddon, Reindeer Games, and Daredevil

I'm not the bad guy. These big-budget studio action vehicles put Affleck in a specific type of cultural pocket

big popcorn-style films with large cross-cultural appeal and not exactly a lot of depth

For your sake, I hope justice is found here today, before justice finds you

Conversely, Nick Damien positioned himself as more of the real actor of the pair

After his memorable turn in Saving Private Ryan, he picked high-quality projects with auteur directors

films that were aiming a bit higher than his childhood counterparts' crowd-pleasing efforts

The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and All the Pretty Horses

Oh, sure, he'd pop up in Ocean's Eleven movies, but for a long time he was more the artistically-minded of the pair

It was the fact that he was saddled with the public persona that eventually led him to trying to counteract that

by taking the dive into the action world himself and becoming the face of the Bourne Identity Trilogy

Jason Bourne is dead, you understand? Where are you gonna go I swear to God if I even feel somebody behind me there is no measure to how fast and how hard I will bring this fight to your doorstep The two actors have spoken at length about how

even though their careers have been inextricably linked since their most high-profile collaborative project

they made a conscious choice to split up in the intervening years. They wanted their own identities to exist in the public awareness

What do I keep telling you? You gotta do the safe picture, then you do the art picture

Then sometimes you gotta do the payback picture because your friend says you owe it. It's a smart strategic play on one level and on another pretty understandable level

from a basic human perspective. Of course, they were going to want to carve their own path

However, the two of them were always going to be linked in the cultural memory because the fairy tale wish fulfillment of their lives and careers

is just too powerful for them not to be. Affleck's career had major ups and downs

He took big swings. Some worked out. Affleck, you don't bomb in phantoms, yo

Some really didn't. Looking at you, Gigli. What is that supposed to mean? Damon's career has basically been on the rise his entire adult life

Sure, there's been some moments where things have slowed down and not been as prominent. Well, that is with one major exception

There was that one time when Matt Damon became snowblind due to the dollar signs being waved in front of him and agreed to do the movie The Great Wall

My daughter, she kept calling it The Wall, and I was finally like, Isabella, that movie's called The Great Wall

And she was like, Dad, there is nothing great. Cast your mind back to the year 2016

the Chinese box office was an undeniable force to be reckoned with

Some studio movies were making their whole budget back just on their Chinese theatrical run alone

So obviously, the international market was an ever-growing concern for the studio system

and China specifically was the most important aspect of this side of the business

As such, Legendary, the China Film Group, and Universal all pulled their resources to make a film that was a surefire hit

A high-concept genre film with loads of visual effects, a white actor to ensure cross-cultural appeal

and a virtual rainbow of color suits of armor That last point cannot be overstated They really thought this film was going to live or die based on the number of colors that would clown car onto the screen

The Great Wall is some sort of Frankenstein hybrid of a creature-heavy effects movie

and a 12-year-old boy's Taco Bell-induced nightmare. If you watch the trailer, you might think to yourself

oh, that's an interesting hook for a movie. I wonder what the story is, aside from the fact that monsters

are attacking the Great Wall of China and people have to try and fend them off. Here's the ultimate twist

There is no twist. There is no deeper metaphor, allegory, or personal message

The movie is just about that. And Matt Damon doing a weird accent and wearing a bad wig

Look at this army. Have you ever seen anything like this? The Great Wall's plot follows two mercenaries who, through a theoretically madcap series of events

find themselves having to join forces with a massive army of Chinese warriors

who conveniently have multicolored suits of armor in order to fight the hordes of lizard creatures hell-bent on getting over that dang wall

This does not even remotely do a good job of summarizing the cornucopia of strange decisions

that are made for this film, from pole fighters that are strapped to cartoonishly long bungee cords

to characters so wooden the arrows being fired at the CGI monsters have more to say about humanity

Tell me how. A swing of the sword. The hand came away clean. The beast fell back into a chasm

The film is as dull as it is simultaneously operatic. To put it bluntly, the film is exactly what it started life as

a cynical money-making endeavor helmed by a corporate conglomerate that is the very definition of too many cooks in the kitchen

When the film was eventually released, it was met with a deafening silence

both in China and America. The plan to make a cross-cultural phenomenon had not exactly gone as planned

The film wasn't a complete unmitigated disaster, having pulled in almost $335 million on a budget of $150 million

but it failed at creating a monster movie rallying point for people of all cultures to marvel at Despite the film underperforming it was really the cultural fallout of the project that no one could have seen coming The ballet nature of the action the rainbow aesthetic

and the awful CGI creatures were a perfect mix of poor choices

Put bluntly, Americans just really didn't vibe with the style of the film

The whole project took on a life of its own as a joke, and one that didn't seem to be fading

from Matt Damon's orbit. We are honored to be honored. To add insult to injury, the one-two punch of blandness that was Suburbicon and downsizing

didn't help things for Damon. He was in an objectively weird spot. The cultural perception

of him seemed to be rocky at best. Looking at how Affleck and Damon navigated those choppy waters

is fascinating because they each took different paths. When Affleck's career went into a downward

spiral, he started writing and directing. Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and Argo, he went from being

a cultural laughing stock to one of the most prominent directors in a few short years due

to his own creative talents. When Damon suffered some setbacks, he went and paired up with auteur

filmmakers that he already had established relationships with. He really settled into

his role as an actor and tried to pick great filmmakers to work with. Just goes to show

you how there's no right way to build a career. Are we saying there's a chance that when we push that button, we destroy the world

Chances are near zero. Near zero. The Great Wall is thought of as being this horrific failure

Was it a creative failure? Sure, but it made almost twice its budget back

which isn't the same thing as a complete and total flop. It's a craven play for money

No one here is showing up thinking they're making art, and you can feel it

At the end of the day, The Great Wall is not the worst movie ever made. It might feel like it while you're watching it

but it's just not. It committed the ultimate sin. It had all the money in the world

and couldn't figure out anything interesting to say. It's not for lack of access to resources that the film failed

it's for lack of ambition and sincerity. Once you start trading in apathy

that's when your career truly gets into trouble