Netflix’s hit thriller The Rip claims to be inspired by true events, but how much of this exhilarating action film actually happened?

The new streaming hit from director Joe Carnahan stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as two Miami cops investigating a stash house after receiving a mysterious tip-off.

Along with a unit of Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT) officers, they discover $20 million in the attic and are legally obligated to count it before leaving the scene.

Conflict arises when the team starts to discuss what they should do with the money while both authorities and the cartel on the outside start to catch wind of the situation.

Everything culminates in a gripping stand-off where the real culprits are finally sniffed out, but how much of The Rip really went down in reality?

Is The Rip based on a true story?

Yes, the premise of The Rip has its foundation in truth as it’s based on a real Miami cop named Chris Casiano who discovered a huge amount of money during his time as head of the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Tactical Narcotics Team.

The exact amount of money found at the scene – revealed by the end of the film to be $20,650,480 (around £15.4 million) – was even the same amount Casiano discovered to the dollar.

Just like in the film, director Carnahan, who is a close friend of Casiano’s, says the money was “sledgehammered out” of a wall. He added that the detail of a dog barking outside was also true.

“I just thought that was really wild,” he told Gold Derby. “I had never experienced a cop story like that.”

Damon’s character Lieutenant Dane Dumars is a stand-in for Casiano, and the grief over the loss of his 10-year-old son, Jake, to cancer is also based on a devastating detail from the real story.

Casiano tragically lost his own real-life son, Jake William Casiano, to leukemia in 2021, and the film is dedicated to his memory.

“It was really important to me that [Jake] be the first name you see, because you understood that there was a beating heart at the centre,” Carnahan explained.

While the basic set-up of The Rip is based in reality, however, the majority of the actual plot has been heavily fictionalised.

Primarily, the reveal in the film that corrupt cops are after for the money themselves and the conflicts around it didn’t actually happen.

Plus, the character portrayed by actress Sasha Calle, Desi, who resides at the stash house when the TNT cops conduct their search, was actually changed from a man who was actually at the scene.

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“You’re required to count it twice, actually, by hand. The real rip – Sasha’s character, in real life, that was an older man,” Carnahan explained.

“At some point they sat this guy down to start counting. They had to get the guy that owned the place also counting! If you’re off by a dollar, Internal Affairs gets involved. This is a very real thing.”

As it wouldn’t be possible to depict the events in real-time, which in reality took around 42 hours, the director said it was their job to “take the elements of it that I thought were cinematic and parse through it.

“Certain things were expedited, certain things were snipped, and so on.”

The Rip is available to stream on Netflix.