Matt Damon and Ben Affleck joined hands to launch Artists Equity, a production company in 2022. Through their venture, they aim to give freedom and profit-sharing back to artists.
In the times when Hollywood is at a standstill due to ongoing strikes from actors and writers against studios due to concerns over the absence of fair profit-sharing, Damon and Affleck’s new company could prove to be a game-changer.
Talking about game-changers, the company has already produced a movie, titled AIR. The movie tells the story of how Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) and Nike collaborated with Michael Jordan to create a partnership that transformed the culture of athlete-brand relationships that transcended basketball.
A Look at Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Iconic Partnership
AIR was released in the theaters in April of this year and made $90 million at the box office. It also marked the start of Ben Affleck‘s “next act of my career for a long, long time,” with the former Batman planning to work only with his and Matt Damon‘s company.
Ben Affleck and Damon work their magic on screen together more frequently – much like Nike and Michael Jordan.
However, their partnership in Hollywood isn’t something new, the duo first appeared together in a film in 1989 and have since gone on to star in nine movies together. Their maiden big-screen debut came as extras in the movie Field of Dreams. Like their production company’s first movie, Field of Dreams was also a sports-based movie.
Their most iconic work to date remains Good Will Hunting – a coming-of-age story on prodigious Will Hunting (Damon) who’s pushed on the right path by his supportive friend Chuckie Sullivan (Affleck). The duo not only starred in the movie but also wrote the screenplay, for which they won an Academy Award in 1998.
In the movie, Hunting is intellectually superior to Chuckie and yet he absolutely loves hanging out with his friend, so much so that Chuckie, who is in construction, warns him to not waste his talents spending time with him and rather pursue important things and make the most of his genius. The mathematics genius objects to this as he really enjoys his best friend’s company.
How Matt Damon Used to Meet Ben Affleck When They Were Kids
It seems the chemistry between Hunting and Chuckie was inspired by the pair’s younger selves, as Damon and Affleck were also very determined to share time together when they were in high school. However, in this setting, Damon (the movie’s Hunting) was much more ambitious, as his meetings with Affleck were delightfully labeled “business lunches”.
Speaking to Graham Norton on The Graham Norton Show in 2015, the Oppenheimer star recalled his hilarious meetings with his friend.
He said: “We called them business lunches. I was 16, and he was 14. There were two cafeterias. We went to a very big high school, there were 3000 kids; there was the main cafeteria and then what they called the media cafeteria, which was a small cafeteria.”
The 52-year-old continued: “We would meet at the media cafeteria for business lunch. We’d be like ‘Hi, Man business lunch today?’ ‘Yeah I’ll see you there, 12:30.’ And we’d get our cheeseburgers and we’d sit down and we wouldn’t have anything to talk about.”
The Oscar-winning duo might not have had much to talk about at that age, but their meetings strengthened their friendship, sowing the seeds for an iconic partnership that led to a masterpiece like Good Will Hunting.
Source: The Graham Norton Show – YouTube
