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

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