Before becoming A-listers in Hollywood, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck got a harsh lesson in money despite their early fame. Back in 1997, they sold their Good Will Hunting screenplay for $600,000, a deal that kick-started their career.
However, the cash didn’t stretch far. The duo quickly learned that early fame and a payday don’t automatically mean financial security.
Matt Damon shares that he and Ben Affleck went broke after selling this major movie
On the New Heights podcast with Jason and Travis Kelce, Damon got honest about the ups and downs of their early Hollywood grind. “When we sold Good Will Hunting—when we sold the screenplay, we thought that was absolutely it—and we were like broke a year later,” Damon admitted.
That $600,000 payday, split between the two, quickly vanished after taxes, agents, and lawyers took their cut. As a result, the duo was left with $150k each, and then they went on to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokees. “We were renting this place in LA … It didn’t take long for us to be like, ‘Dude, we gotta get another job.’”
Even though Good Will Hunting was a huge hit, Damon pointed out that the money side of Hollywood doesn’t always feel fair. Affleck, for instance, got a flat paycheck for directing, writing, and acting in movies like The Town, which didn’t reflect the lasting value of his work.
“At the time, that movie made a fortune. But he was on a flat salary, and I don’t even think he made a million bucks for that movie, and he wrote it, directed it, starred in it,” Damon said. “It was one of those things … Our view was, ‘Look, if you do something like that as one of the real contributors to it, if there’s money kind of in perpetuity, then you should be a part of that.'”
Originally reported by Rishabh Shandilya on Mandatory.
