Matt Damon’s The Instigators is still drawing viewers on Apple TV nearly a year after it arrived straight to streaming in the summer of 2024. The crime film, directed by Doug Liman and co-starring Casey Affleck, remains one of the platform’s most popular movies in dozens of countries around the world.
That popularity has outlasted the reviews. The film holds a 41% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and 55% from audiences, a split that puts it among Damon’s more polarizing recent releases. Affleck also wrote the screenplay with Chuck MacLean, giving the movie a second creative link to a familiar screen presence even as the response stayed mixed.
The continuing interest matters because Damon’s year is already shaping up to be a strong one beyond The Instigators. He is scheduled to star in The Odyssey this summer, a historical epic from Christopher Nolan, after previously taking a supporting role in Nolan’s 2023 Best Picture winner Oppenheimer. That puts him back in a lane that has worked well for him: prestige projects with wide audience reach.
There is a tension in the numbers. The Instigators was not embraced by critics and did only slightly better with audiences, yet it has stayed visible across Apple TV’s global charts. The same movie that landed as a quiet streaming release in 2024 is still behaving like a crowd-pleaser, even if the response to the film itself never fully caught up with its reach.
For Damon, that is the point. The Instigators may not have become a critical favorite, but it has remained part of a run that includes The Rip, one of the biggest Netflix movies of 2026, on which he and Ben Affleck serve as executive producers, and The Odyssey later this summer. The question is no longer whether The Instigators was liked; it is whether a movie can still count as a win when audiences keep watching long after the reviews have faded.
