A box-office banker: How Matt Damon became Hollywood's leading man

Cast Matt Damon in your film, and he will give you a better return than any other actor. So Forbes magazine says. Andrew Gumbel reports on a man who makes movies that people actually want to see

Wednesday, 8 August 2007

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Matt Damon's agent no doubt sat up and paid attention yesterday morning when Forbes, the business magazine, pronounced his client to be a very particular sort of top movie star - the one who provides the best return on the studios' investment.

That does not make him Hollywood's top celebrity - that honour, Forbes decided a couple of months ago, belonged to Brad Pitt, both for his on-screen successes and the tsunami of media coverage surrounding his marriage to Angelina Jolie.

Nor does it make Damon the best paid actor in the business - the likes of Will Smith, Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio easily outstrip him on that front.

If anything, it is precisely because he is not paid top dollar that he is so interesting, from a financial point of view. A Matt Damon film, the magazine reported, will make back an average of $29 (£15) for every dollar the star is paid. That's roughly twice as much as Cruise or Tom Hanks. Pitt, who finished second on the Forbes list, will earn back about 24 times as much as he gets paid.

Not far behind him, tied for third place, are Johnny Depp, star of the monstrously successful Pirates of the Caribbean series, and Vince Vaughn, a comic actor with considerable domestic box-office appeal even if he is far less well known overseas.

Below them come Jennifer Aniston - a surprise, perhaps - Angelina Jolie, Renée Zellweger, Reese Witherspoon, Ben Stiller and Sandra Bullock.

Like Damon, these are not necessarily the industry's top earners at all. No Julia Roberts. No Jim Carrey. No Russell Crowe - who, according to Forbes, provides the worst value for money of any big star because his price tag is sky-high ($20m per picture of thereabouts) and his record on drawing in audiences is middling to poor ever since his back-to-back Oscar nomination appearances in Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind more than six years ago.

What the members of the list all have in common is that they are not grotesquely overpaid. In Aniston's case, they are hardly in the top movie star bracket at all. And yet they are all nice little earners, for a variety of reasons. Vince Vaughn will never be mistaken for a great actor, but his gentle (and occasionally not-so-gentle) comedies almost invariably draw a big domestic audience - films that have recently included The Wedding Crashers (about two guys who go to other people's weddings to pick up women) and The Break-Up (in which he co-starred with Aniston).

A lot of things about the Forbes list, like much else in the movie business, is of course a crapshoot. Damon happens to have been in two highly successful multi-film series, both of which scored big this summer: the Ocean's Eleven series, in which he was merely a member of an all-star ensemble cast, not the lead, and the Bourne series, whose third instalment, The Bourne Ultimatum, earned rave reviews and broke US box-office records for August when it made more than $70m on its opening weekend last weekend.

Damon also happens to have taken a punt on several low-budget films, in which he worked for a drastically reduced fee, that turned out to be critical and, in some cases, box-office successes. The biggest of these was Martin Scorsese's Irish gangster drama The Departed, set in Damon's home city of Boston, which turned out to be the director's biggest box-office hit ever and earned him his first, highly elusive Oscar.

But Damon also appeared in Syriana, the mosaic-like film about American power, corruption and geopolitics, and in Robert De Niro's directorial portrait of the early years of the CIA, The Good Shepherd. Damon himself would be the first to acknowledge that his run of success has been as much about luck as any brilliance on his part. Go back a few years, when he appeared in Robert Redford's expensive flop, The Legend of Bagger Vance, followed by All The Pretty Horses, Billy Bob Thornton's equally disastrous adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel, and the state of his career looked very different.

As Damon himself has told it, he did not receive a single film offer for six months, prompting him to go to London for a while to appear in Kenneth Lonergan's play This Is Our Youth in the West End. It was not until the first Bourne film, The Bourne Identity, became a big hit in 2002 that his career got back on track.

His career trajectory has not been entirely unlike that of his co-star in The Departed, Leonardo DiCaprio. Both had splashy entrances on to the Hollywood scene - in Damon's case, when he co-wrote and starred in the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, in DiCaprio's when he starred in the biggest box-office mamma of them all, Titanic.

Both then had fallow periods in which they were written off in some quarters as callow pretty-boys without the range or depth to make it much further. And both are now basking in a rare sort of critical and industry favour - seen as highly talented performers who can also draw a large audience. The only difference between them, in the end, is the money. DiCaprio is now solidly in the $20m per film bracket, while Damon's fee is closer to $10m. That's probably the one and only reason why Damon ended up topping the list and DiCaprio did not make the top 10.

Looking over Damon's credits, one thing nevertheless quickly becomes very obvious - that he has excellent taste in the projects he chooses. Not everything he has done has been successful, but it has all been consistently interesting. From his first break-out role, as a drug-addicted soldier in Courage Under Fire, to his starring turn in the little-seen Terry Gilliam feature The Brothers Grimm, he has picked films that have all at least had the potential to be ground-breaking, compelling material.

Most remarkably, that's been true of his mainstream, popcorn choices as well as his more artsy ones. The Ocean's Eleven series may be self-consciously silly, but it comes with an outstanding pedigree, starting with director Steven Soderbergh, and probably has more in-jokes about the art of movie-making than anything since the French New Wave.

Likewise, Bourne might superficially be all action thrills and spills, but each of the three films - the first directed by Doug Liman, the other two by Paul Greengrass - has been expertly crafted and a model of its genre.

They are also likely to prove to be the gift that keeps on giving. When Damon signed on for the first Bourne, he liked the idea of trying a completely different genre but, like the producers themselves, had no real way of knowing if Robert Ludlum's pulp fiction could translate into the post-Cold War world.

He almost lost the part because he refused to sign on for more than one film at a time but quickly came to an understanding with both Liman, who stayed on after the first film as a producer, and Greengrass that there was no point continuing the series unless each instalment had something new to say.

Their determination paid off - each film turned out to be a clear improvement on its predecessor and, unlike almost any other string of sequels in movie history, earned more and more money each time.

Damon now has a clear choice. He and his agent can follow the time-honoured path of negotiating ever higher fees - using his bankability as their number-one argument - until he reaches the point where the return on the investment in him dwindles to a far more modest number. Such has been the fate of Cruise, Hanks, Jack Nicholson, and just about any other Hollywood leading man you might care to think of.

Or he can settle for a little less, financially speaking, and continue to make bold choices that will probably result in better movies. This second route is certainly the one that Damon has talked most openly about taking.

On a press junket for Bourne in Australia this week, Damon told reporters how, as far as he is concerned, the Bourne series has freed him up to do just about anything he wants.

In the pipeline are a Francis Ford Coppola drama set in the run-up to the Second World War, Youth Without Youth, and a film by Kenneth Lonergan, who previously made the highly regarded You Can Count On Me, called Margaret. Damon has also signed on for Imperial Life in the Emerald City, an adaptation of the non-fiction book describing the disastrous US occupation of Iraq. Paul Greengrass is adapting the book and is earmarked to direct.

"Some people get into this business and they're so afraid to lose anything," he once said. "They try to protect their position like clinging to a beachhead. These actors end up making really safe choices. I never wanted to go that route. If I go down, I'm going down swinging."

That, of course, is a baseball metaphor - Damon is a huge fan of Boston Red Sox, a team famous for its tenacity even when it went through an 86-year drought without a World Series win. For the moment, though, Damon's own swings seem to be producing nothing but hits.

The best and the worst investments

1 Matt Damon, $1 = $29 return

2 Brad Pitt, $24

3= Vince Vaughn, $21

3= Johnny Depp, $21

5 Jennifer Aniston, $17

6 Angelina Jolie, $15

7 Renée Zellweger, $ 14

8= Reese Witherspoon, $13

8= Ben Stiller, $13

8= Sandra Bullock, $13

11 Tom Hanks, $12