Famous pals Ben Affleck and Matt Damon – who won an Oscar for their Good Will Hunting screenplay back in 1998 – are back on screen together for the biographical drama Air, the story of shoe salesman Sonny Vaccaro, who helped revolutionise the Nike brand by striking a business deal with then-rookie player Michael Jordan.
Directed by Affleck, and with Damon in the lead role as Vaccaro (Affleck also stars as Nike's co-founder Phil Knight), Air is the first release from Affleck and Damon's independent production company, Artists Equity, a new company that aims to give actors and crews a cut of the profits.
The creation of Artists Equity is partly a reaction to the growth of streaming services – at the moment, many actors, directors, writers and crew only get paid for their work during the making of a movie. Well known talent sometimes get a percentage of the profits – also known as 'back-end participation' – but that only relates to box-office earnings at the cinema.
That means they don't see any extra money when a movie is successful on a streaming service like Netflix or Disney+.
Damon and Affleck's company aims to change all that, as Affleck explained in an interview with The New York Times.
"As streamers have proliferated, they have really ended back-end participation, and so this is partly an effort to try and recapture some of that value and share it in a way that is more equitable," he explained. "Not just writers and directors and stars. But also cinematographers, editors, costume designers and other crucial artists who, in my view, are very underpaid."
It's quite fitting that the first movie to be produced by profit-sharing Artists Equity is Air, as the film shows how basketball player Michael Jordan changed the sports industry with his own profit-sharing deal with Nike.
Affleck, however, says it was more luck than planning that Air mirrors his and Damon's real-life experience.
"It's certainly very ambitious to aim for the success of Michael Jordan, I should be so lucky," he said in an exclusive interview with Digital Spy for the release of Air. "But in terms of the ethos, one of the things that was kismet about this was some of the themes in terms of changing ways that businesses operate in small ways can make big differences.
"Really it's about, how do you reward the people that drive value, how do you incentivise people, how do you make them feel included, how do you take risks and feel confident, how do you manage to do so anyway and work collaboratively? In that sense, there were a lot of themes connected to the movie."
Damon agrees that they didn't purposely choose Air to launch their new company because of its themes.
"We didn't intend that to be the case," he told Digital Spy. "What we were really looking for, for our first movie, was something that was really performance-driven. Those are the movies we loved when we grew up that were really about the writing and the acting.
"We wanted something that was a story that was relatively contained, but really interesting, that we could just get the best possible actors [for] and tell a very simple story and tell it really well. It just so happened that it was a story about profit sharing which we're trying to do at the company. That was unintentional."
Of course, the movie isn't just about Michael Jordan's business deal with Nike (because that would be a snoozefest), as Affleck is quick to point out.
"I don't want to give the impression it's a business movie or dry and boring, it's actually quite human and fun and funny, and it has this amazing cast," he says, referring to co-stars including Jason Bateman, Marlon Wayans, Viola Davis, Chris Tucker and Chris Messina.
"It's really about how we worship heroes and how this particular hero was so meaningful and powerful that he did change the entire business, sports and advertising climate, created a culture where people have become associated with brands and we take that for granted [now] on social media. Now we have this gigantic sneaker culture, all of which is a result of Michael Jordan, and what happened in this movie."
Air is released in cinemas on April 5.
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Freelance film & TV writer, Digital Spy
Critic and writer Jo Berry has been writing about TV and movies since she began her career at Time Out aged 18. A regular on BBC Radio, Jo has written for titles including Empire, Maxim, Radio Times, OK!, The Guardian and Grazia, is the author of books including Chick Flicks and The Parents’ Guide to Kids’ Movies.
She is also the editor of website Movies4Kids. In her career, Jo has interviewed well-known names including Beyonce, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Kiefer Sutherland, Tom Cruise and all the Avengers, spent many an hour crushed in the press areas of award show red carpets. Jo is also a self-proclaimed expert on Outlander and Brassic, and completely agrees that Die Hard is a Christmas movie.
