In a podcast interview, actor Matt Damon was asked whether he was surprised by any of his movies that weren’t as well received as he expected. He said

“They are all bets to a certain degree…

You don’t see the movie before you make it. You get the ingredients for whatever you’re cooking. You see what the ingredients are, and you go, ‘alright, with all these people around we should be able to do something pretty good.’ 

Hopefully you start with something you thought was great, and end up with something good.

And some of them just don’t work.”