‘Avatar’ director tells Matt Damon ‘get over it’ on him losing money on saying no to film
James Cameron is not very happy with the whole Matt Damon episode. We are talking of Matt Damon revealing that he regrets rejecting ‘Avatar’ as he had other engagements at the time and lost on a lot of money. Matt turned down a role in the James Cameron film even though the director offered him 10% of the film’s box office profits.
‘Avatar’ went on to gross over $2 billion worldwide and become the highest-grossing movie of all time (unadjusted for inflation). This would mean that Matt Damon would have earned about $250 million and plus.
When Matt spoke of rejecting Avatar, he said, “I will go down in history. You will never meet an actor who turned down more money.”
James Cameron was thus asked for his comment on Matt’s statement. The director laughed and said, “He’s beating himself up over this. And I really think you know, ‘Matt you’re kind of like one of the biggest movie stars in the world, get over it.’ But he had to do another ‘Bourne’ film which was on his runway and there was nothing we could do about that. So he had to regretfully decline.”
Matt Damon had turned down Avatar at the time as he was finishing up his ‘Bourne’ action trilogy with director Paul Greengrass.
