Matt Damon Once Shared That a ‘Good Will Hunting’ Sequel Already Happened in This Raunchy Comedy
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck achieved enormous success after penning the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting. The film left such an impression that some hoped to see a Good Will Hunting sequel down the line. But Damon believed a second Good Will Hunting movie already appeared in this classic comedy.
Matt Damon once revealed how he felt about a ‘Good Will Hunting’ sequel
Damon didn’t mince words when expressing his opinion about a Good Will Hunting sequel. The actor has always felt that a second film shouldn’t be made for the sole sake of profitable gain. For The Bourne Identity star, a sequel to his Oscar-winning movie would’ve been just that. Besides, he joked to fans that a Good Will Hunting sequel already somewhat existed.
“We did the sequel in Jay & Silent Job Strike Back,” Damon once said to Empire. “I think that’s as far as it’ll ever go. We’re not interested in doing a sequel to that, the movie has a very definite end. Talk about milking the cash cow; that would be just f***ing shameless.”
Damon’s referring to the Jay & Silent Bob scene where Damon and Affleck reprised their Good Will Hunting characters in a parody.
Still, there were others who wanted to see a legitimate sequel even decades after the film came out.
“Someone just tried to pitch Ben Good Will Hunting 2,” Damon recently told a reporter at Variety. “I s*** you not — that happened. He told me today. He was like, ‘You’re not going to believe what I heard.’ This was a flat-out sequel. I don’t get it.”
Affleck more or less corroborated Damon’s claims.
“Matt is always telling stories that he should not be telling,” Affleck said.
However, the Air star reassured that a Good Will Hunting sequel wasn’t going to happen.
Matt Damon once shared this director’s wildly different vision for ‘Good Will Hunting’
Good Will Hunting had gone through quite a few changes before it made it to the big screen. There was a time when Damon and Affleck wrote the movie as more of an action feature than the provocative drama it evolved into.
“And it had a very Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run sensibility, where the kids from Boston were giving the NSA the slip all the time,” Affleck once told Boston.
The movie would quickly go in another more intimate direction following subsequent drafts. But that wasn’t the only version of Good Will Hunting that was pitched. Heat director Michael Mann was in consideration for the project before Gus Van Sant got a hold of it. But Mann’s take on Good Will hunting was such a departure from Affleck and Damon’s vision that the concept completely lost the two friends.
“I remember he showed us clips of Mexican gangs,” Damon once said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Playlist). “He was like, ‘this is your movie!’ ‘This is the movie you gotta make.’ I was like, ‘What??’ These dudes have neck tats; they’re Mexican; that’s not at all what South Boston is, man. I didn’t understand, and I dunno; I think he wanted to take it in a really dark, like these dudes are like wacking people in the street.”
Affleck had also seen Mann’s version of Good Will Hunting and had a similar response.
“But I do remember him showing to Ben and to us [the Mexican gang bangers footage], we’re sitting there, and he walks out of the room, and we looked at each other, ‘What the f*** is going on?’ Like we wrote it, that’s our movie,” Damon remembered.
