With their latest project, Oscar-winning actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, will boldly go where they have gone before ... creating films that makes businesses the bad guys.
The Hollywood Reporter said on Oct. 13, they due will create “Incorporated” for SyFy. It will be a “a futuristic espionage thriller set in a world where corporations have seemingly unlimited power.”
“The drama will be the story of one man's efforts to beat the system,” Hollywood Reporter said.
Even at its early stage of development, Affleck and Damon earned entertainment media support. Sarah Gibson of moviepilot.com wrote on Oct. 17 that the pair’s political activism bolstered the premise of “Incorporated.” Both Affleck and Damon “have publicly supported campaign finance reform, so they already know a thing or two about how powerful corporations are.”
“And there's the sobering realization that Incorporated's premise isn't that farfetched...” Gibson continued.
Anti-business films were nothing new for Affleck or Damon. Both have made films exploring similar themes as “Incorporated.”
In the 2000 film “Boiler Room,” Affleck played the head of a shady brokerage firm that sold its clients stocks in worthless companies to make money for itself. Onscreen, the firm was eventually brought down by the FBI but not before the movie glamorized the lifestyle that the firm’s shady practices afforded the brokers.
Damon’s 2013 film “Elysium” portrayed a future where most of humanity inhabited a ruined and crowded earth while the elites lived on a space station with every comfort of life and technology that could provide for their every need. Damon’s character fought against the elites to save his own life and help the people that still lived on Earth. The elites were shown as unfeeling or worse, some were willing to kill people that tried to escape the surface rather than help them.
Damon also starred in the 2012 anti-fracking film “Promised Land,” in which he portrayed an employee of an energy company that used underhanded tactics to get people to sell drilling rights. His attempt to push an anti-fracking message failed at the box office, where it made slightly more than $8 million worldwide. The film cost $15 million dollars.
Affleck and Damon’s anti-business film ventures fit right in with Hollywood’s standard portrayal of companies and business people. For years, corporations and their leaders have been movie villians. “Wall Street,” released in 1987, was one of the most memorable given fictional Wall Street broker Gordon Gecko’s “greed is good” speech. Gecko made a fortune through insider trading and other dirty deeds and taught his protégé Bud Fox to do the same. The 2010 sequel, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” released in 2010, followed a similar theme.
The "RoboCop" film series struck a similar chord to the initial descriptions of “Incorporated.” From the first "RoboCop" movie in 1987 to sequels released in 1990 and 1993 as well as 2014 remake, the major theme in all of them that a large corporation had privatized the police force of Detroit and took control over its operation. The corporation’s power was greater than the city government. They company was shown caring only about making money and expanding their power and influence, no matter what effect they had on the city.
