How much has Hollywood spent rescuing Matt Damon?

For nearly three decades, the film industry has repeatedly put one of its most bankable actors somewhere extremely inconvenient and then spent an enormous amount of money trying to get him back.

Occupied France.

A frozen planet.

Mars.

Heaven.

At some point somebody has to ask whether it would be cheaper simply to stop sending Matt Damon places.

So we got the calculator out.

One important accounting note: these are the production budgets of the films, not the fictional cost of the rescue operations themselves.

Is that an absurd methodology?

Yes.

Are we proceeding anyway?

Obviously.

Saving Private Ryan

Private James Francis Ryan is somewhere in Normandy.

His three brothers have been killed and the US Army decides Ryan should be brought home. Unfortunately, nobody seems entirely certain where he is.

Captain Miller and seven other men are therefore sent through occupied France to find him.

This does not go particularly smoothly.

It is the first major entry on the Damon Rescue Account and establishes what will become a worrying Hollywood precedent.

Matt Damon is missing.

Send everyone.

Interstellar

DAMON LOCATION: PLANET MANN

Things have escalated.

France is at least on Earth.

In Interstellar, Damon plays Dr Mann, an astronaut sent through a wormhole in search of a planet capable of supporting human life.

When the crew of the Endurance eventually reaches him, they discover that Mann has been sending data suggesting his frozen planet might be habitable.

It isn't.

He just really wanted someone to come and get him.

Fair enough.

Unfortunately, retrieving Matt Damon now involves spacecraft, suspended animation, a wormhole near Saturn and some fairly serious disagreements about the nature of time.

The Martian

DAMON LOCATION: MARS

By 2015, you might reasonably expect Hollywood to have learned something.

Instead, it strands him on Mars.

Damon plays astronaut Mark Watney, presumed dead and accidentally abandoned by his crew after a violent storm.

He survives.

NASA discovers he survives.

And at this point the film essentially becomes the largest Matt Damon retrieval operation yet attempted.

Scientists work the problem.

NASA builds things.

China gets involved.

His crewmates turn their spacecraft around.

Human civilisation briefly appears to unite around the proposition that Matt Damon cannot be left on Mars.

And then there is Dogma

DAMON LOCATION: SPIRITUALLY LOST

This one requires a slightly more generous interpretation of the rules.

Matt Damon plays Loki, an angel who has been banished from Heaven alongside Ben Affleck's Bartleby.

Technically, nobody has lost him.

God knows where he is.

Presumably.

But Loki and Bartleby have very definitely lost their way and are attempting to exploit a theological loophole that will allow them to return home.

The problem is that succeeding would prove God fallible and therefore undo existence.

Which feels like the sort of rescue situation where somebody should intervene.

The invoice

So there we have it.

Four films.

Occupied France: $70 million

Frozen planet: $165 million

Mars: $108 million

Theologically complicated journey home: $10 million