This is the best Boston movie, according to Boston.com readers

We’ve got a winner.

Boston.com readers have chosen Good Will Hunting as the winner of our Massachusetts Movie Madness bracket after ten days and almost 10,000 votes.

Good Will Hunting outlasted three Best Picture Oscar winners, blockbusters that brought in hundreds of millions of dollars, and films that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck produced or directed, such as The Town and Manchester by the Sea, nearly 30 years after their film made the Cambridge natives famous.

Are you sad that the most well-known Cambridge Rindge & Latin alumni couldn’t be overthrown by Jaws or The Departed? It’s not your fault, to paraphrase Robin Williams’ character Dr. Sean Maguire.

Every time we have asked readers to name their favorite Boston films, they have always chosen Good Will Hunting. In a survey asking readers to select the best Boston film in 2021, it garnered 43% of the vote, with no other film receiving less than 25%.

Jaws lost to Good Will Hunting in the finals by a margin of 57 to 43 percent, but at least they stayed close in our bracket.

Why does Good Will Hunting still have a following when so many other movies that were considered masterpieces at the time have vanished from the public eye? In some respects, the tale of two local boys who made amends is just as much a part of the film as the story on screen.

The script, which started as Damon’s Harvard class project, took years to create and shop. When they insisted on playing the lead in the movie, they were ridiculed out of existence at practically every studio they went to. In order to conserve money, Castle Rock, the movie’s initial studio, preferred to shoot in Canada rather than Boston.

And Damon and Affleck returned to Davis Square in Somerville, almost destitute and uncertain if their picture would ever be released, after director Gus Van Sant and imprisoned Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein squabbled for months over the film’s final cut.

The narrative of Rocky, whose actor Sylvester Stallone authored his own screenplay and turned down six-figure offers from companies that wouldn’t allow him star in it, is the only contemporary Hollywood tale that even substantially resembles Good Will Hunting. In Philadelphia, there is now a statue of Rocky Balboa.

The possibility of a statue honoring Good Will Hunting is a testament to the movie’s legacy. If Matt Damon had his way, there might be a memorial to Robin Williams in the Public Garden.

Let’s conclude this contest with statements from the stars themselves, provided by Boston Magazine’s oral history of the movie, after people have spent the last ten days sharing what Good Will Hunting means to them.

It’s incredible how frequently people approach you in public spaces like airports and start chatting about it, saying things like, “I see it at least once a year, or I’ve seen it thirty times.” People take the movie with them everywhere they go. Skarsgard, Stellan

I believe it’s a film that people have seen. For some folks, it’s more than just a movie, which is fantastic. Williams, Robin

All of my life and career can be traced back to this experience. Ben Affleck

There probably won’t be another film that made me feel that way. because of that period of our lives and what it meant to us. At this stage of my life, I couldn’t devote that much of myself to another movie. My life would never be altered by a movie in that way again. Damon Matt

Kevin Slane writes about culture and entertainment as a staff writer for Boston.com. Movie reviews, streaming guidelines, celebrities, and Boston activities are the main topics of his work.