Before he bounced back with the contemporary holiday classic The Holdovers, director Alexander Payne did what many other filmmakers at that stage of their career would have, and attempted to make a big-budget movie. Similarly, Noah Baumbach, who’d spent years directing small-budget comedy dramas, went and made White Noise on a reported budget of $140 million for Netflix in 2022, only to be hit with the worst reviews of his career. It was only a few years prior that Payne made the $70 million science-fiction comedy drama Downsizing, starring Matt Damon as a man who elects to undergo an irreversible procedure that reduces a person’s mass. The film is set in a dystopian future overrun by climate change and environmental decline, where “downsizing” has become a solution to humanity’s growing consumption of natural resources. Nearly a decade after its release, the movie is heading to the Paramount+ streaming service next month.
The high-concept premise was combined with Payne’s trademark humor, which could be a reason why mainstream audiences didn’t connect with it. Produced on a budget that has been reported to be as high as $76 million, Downsizing grossed only $55 million worldwide. The movie was released in the same year as Suburbicon, another Damon movie that underperformed terribly at the box office. Critical reception for Downsizing was more divisive than mixed. The movie is now sitting at a 47% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “Downsizing assembles a talented cast in pursuit of some truly interesting ideas — which may be enough for some audiences to forgive the final product’s frustrating shortcomings.” The audience rating on RT is even worse, at a cataclysmic 26%.
‘Downsizing’ Introduced Audiences to Hong Chau
Despite the divisive response, Downsizing was selected by the National Board of Review as one of the 10 best films of 2017, while Hong Chau earned a Golden Globe nod for her supporting performance. In many ways, Downsizing was her breakout project, and she has since gone on to deliver memorable performances in HBO’s Watchmen, the sleeper hit The Menu, and The Whale, for which she earned an Oscar nod. Damon, on the other hand, is gearing up to headline his biggest project yet, director Christopher Nolan’s epic film The Odyssey, which will be released theatrically next year.
You can watch Downsizing on Paramount+ beginning December 1, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
Release Date
December 22, 2017
Runtime
135minutes
Director
Alexander Payne
Writers
Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor