The Real Reason Demogorgons Didn’t Appear in the Stranger Things Finale

A lot was going on in the series finale of Stranger Things, but somewhere between the Hawkins gang’s giant CG battle against the Mind Flayer, Vecna getting his head chopped off, and the long goodbyes, you may have noticed that one iconic monster from the series was strangely (no pun intended) absent: the demogorgon. Since […]

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Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are at the stage in their careers where they appear to be doing movies together almost entirely so it can be an excuse to hang out with one another. Take the new trailer we have for Netflix’s cops-turned-robbers throwback thriller, The Rip. Directed by Joe Carnahan of Smokin’ Aces and The Grey fame, it appears to be a pretty basic action-adjacent programmer of the kind that, say, Pacino and De Niro would’ve made together 20 years ago (so not Heat).

Which is to say, it is being marketed, not un-persuasively, on the appeal of watching Affleck and Damon working together again. Hey, it worked in the winsome Nike meets MJ movie, Air, and fueled what is probably Ridley Scott’s most underrated historical epic, The Last Duel. Also like that latter movie, a lot of The Rip seems to be about these famously loving buddies playing guys who don’t like each other.

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In the case of The Rip, this comes courtesy of the pair being over-seasoned and world-weary Miami detectives who discover a bag full of money stashed in a derelict house. Inevitably loyalties start to stray, and an impressive supporting cast that includes Steve Yeun, Sasha Calle, and awards season-frontrunner Teyana Taylor will most assuredly find themselves caught in the middle. Still, the heart of the marketing seems entirely based around watching Affleck and Damon onscreen together again, this time as rivals turned enemies faster than you can say The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

And we’ll be honest that sounds like a lot of fun. However, as fans of both actors and their rare Hollywood story of lasting friendship and collaboration, we cannot help but wonder if it isn’t time for the pair to do another movie where they’re buddies onscreen again? Famously, they won their Original Screenplay Oscar together for co-authoring Good Will Hunting, a movie in which they starred as hardknock Boston buds who were ride or die until Affleck’s character told Will Hunting to literally ride on without him.

Afterward the duo were seen as an inseparable pair, an image they embraced for a time, including when they played fallen angels who had been riding and seeing other folks die for millennia in Kevin Smith’s cult classic, Dogma. Afterward, however, perhaps wisely they chose to cultivate some distance in their careers so that they could stand as their own men. The fact both have survived tremendous ups and downs in the industry nearly 30 years later speaks to a level of talent and shrewdness on both filmmakers’ part, and after all these years it’s nice to see them just work together again on a film in the same way you and a college pal might play fantasy football. It’s just nice to catch up.

We’ll admit seeing Affleck play a pompous French aristocrat douchebag who lords himself over Damon in The Last Duel is a bemusing subversion on their off-screen reputation. And even in the Affleck-directed Air, the pair’s somewhat contentious relationship as a shoemaker employer (Affleck) and employee (Damon) was another nice swerve from the actual dynamic. But after all these years, maybe it’s time to see them just hanging out in a Beantown bar again, or chilling at an airport while waxing philosophical about love and God or something. Let the boys be the boys once more onscreen.

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