Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have been close friends since they were in high school together, and anyone remotely familiar with their body of work also knows they have a long history of professionally collaborating together. This began when they starred in and wrote 1997’s Good Will Hunting, which netted them the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Their latest team-up is the cop thriller The Rip, one of the first 2026 movie releases. A new trailer for this Netflix subscription-exclusive feature has been released, and I’m already getting tense about what’s in store for these characters.
Damon and Affleck respective star as Lieutenant Dane Dumars and Detective Sergeant JD Byrne in this story about a group of Miami cops who discover millions of dollars stored in barrels inside a derelict house. Naturally that amount of money is going to cause problems when they start splitting it amongst themselves, and when outside forces learn about its seizure, they start to wonder if they even trust each other. We even see Dumars question if Byrne is a snitch, and I’m wondering if one of them will be among the dead by the time The Rip is over, because you know a lot of bodies are going to be dropped.
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Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are joined in The Rip (which released its first trailer last September) by Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Sasha Calle, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Scott Adkins and Kyle Chandler. Joe Carnahan wrote and directed the feature, with this following his 2025 features Shadow Force and Not Without Hope. The Rip marks the first collaboration between Netflix and Artists Equity, Damon and Affleck’s production company that they founded in 2022. The movie’s release follows a little over three years after Affleck referred to Netflix as an “assembly line.”
The Rip is Damon and Affleck’s 15th collaboration together, whether it be starring opposite one another, or one or both of them working behind the scenes. The last time they shared the screen with each other was in 2023’s Air, which was also the first movie that Artists Equity put out. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for Damon and Affleck to do a movie where they’re playing cops, but hey, better late than never!
We’ll see how the latest team-up between these two Hollywood icons turned out when The Rip is released January 16 on Netflix, the same day that 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will start playing in theaters. Whatever twists and turns await Damon and Affleck’s characters in this cop thriller, it’s already quite evident that this is one of those movies not to watch if you’re looking for a relaxing time, but rather to get your pulse racing a bit.
