The Matrix Resurrections estimated to lose Warner Bros $100M
wegotthiscovered.com
wegotthiscovered.com
There's a reason they call it Hollywood Accounting[1].
Not that Warner Brothers is new to this game either:
>A Warner Bros. receipt was leaked online, showing that the hugely successful movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ended up with a $167 million loss on paper after grossing nearly $1 billion.
It's certainly possible this is a case of Hollywood Accounting, but is there any particular reason we think it is, vs just a film losing a lot of money normally?
Matrix was viewed about 3 million times in its opening week. Assuming it doubles that over the first month, that’d be 6M * 7 or an impact value of $42MM. If you want to be generous, multiply again by a number to account for HBO Max’s smaller size compared to Netflix, or to account for Max’s strategic importance to Warner. Either way, the contribution is significant but not enough to make Matrix 4 a hit relative to its budget.
This thing bombed everywhere. People with existing subscriptions watching it doesn't make it any. More profitable to Warner Bros
By this logic, platforms will never need new content ever in order to keep existing subscribers happy.
It's not just new subscriptions, it's also retention: do people stay subscribed to platform X because movies like The Matrix Resurrections are on the platform?
It'd be rather hard to measure for a single film, it's the aggregate of platform content that dictates retention, I would think.
If the answer is yes, then the platforms will continue to pay companies like WB to film "box office bombs".
Nevermind that they are the same company.
And people with existing subscriptions don’t matter, because Warner Bros isn’t getting subscription money directly, they’re getting money from deals with subscription services.
Edit: HBO is owned by Warner. So even if they don’t do accounting such that HBO pays Warner but just track subscription revenue directly, it still doesn’t matter. Retaining subscribers is hugely important, not just getting brand new subscriptions. It does make it a lot harder to compare box office receipts though.
From HBO's perspective, they also benefit from having a 'blockbuster' in their catalogue since it signals to potential subscribers that they're a platform you can expect to view high-budget movies.
And you can add half of that again for the marketing budget.
I don't really know much about the industry, or what it take to make a film like this, but $100m is enough to pay 1000 people 100k. Did this film take that many people, that long to make?
I would imagine CGI is reducing a lot of expensive things (like blowing up aircraft, and expensive location shoots).
I'm probably not up with the times, but I don't really see many actors in that film that would be classed as A-list (although the definition of that is somewhat loose).
I really like Keanu, and he seems like a great guy, but I don't think he getting paid $20 million a film, although his popularity seems on the rise again (but perhaps that is just on Reddit). He was reportedly paid 2.5mil for some of the John Wick films, and you'd have to imagine he is the top paid in this latest matrix film.
Regardless, I have already said I don't know much about the industry, and I haven't even seen the film, so it is all just speculation on my end. However, I'm willing to bet that a significant percentage of the reported spend went to subsidiaries charging healthy margins, which is common in the industry to help cut into the % of profits the studio would have to share with people as part of their contracts.
My SO is a huge The Walking Dead nut. There was a couple seasons (episodes?) that (from the outside) looked more like a vehicle to sell cars (pun intended) than to advance the storyline.
'Memba new coke? Stranger Things did, too!
Sure, go watch ET - there's obvious product placement too - what was it, pizza hut? Pepsi? M&Ms? It's been a while, but it was rarely the McGuffin in the storyline.
Did ET want to call home or did ET use the latest 5g sprint network on ETs new Samsung Flip mobile, exclusively at Sprint stores, everywhere, to call home?
It's so transparent, and then to have the audacity to charge $30 to view this 90-minute product placement informercial.. and yet the masses gobble it up and it's just a feedback loop of "Well, it's working! Let's _double down_ next time!" <Queue the KFC commercial>
Just take a look at the credits at the end of a blockbuster movie to see how many specialized skills are required.
From Wikipedia:
> Filming started in February 2020 but was halted the next month by the COVID-19 pandemic. Wachowski toyed with the possibility of shelving the project and leaving the film unfinished, but the cast insisted that she finish it. Filming resumed in August 2020, concluding three months later.
I am happy to admit I don't really know what I am talking about. All my info is either a quick google and some gut feelings around projects. Happy to be told otherwise by someone with experience in the industry, or with references.
In short, a lot of people work a long time on a movie on this scale. The credit roll are the names they have to mention due to contracts or union regulations, but a lot more are involved in various support functions or as sub-contractors.
And of course salary is not the only expense. You need soundstages, workshops, offices, administrative functions. Movie equipment is extremely expensive. Set building can be expensive - for Matrix Reloaded they literally built a two-mile stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere in order to film the car chase scene.
If you need on-location shoots, there is a lot of logistics involved. Transporting a large crew and equipment to some inconvenient location and establishing the necessary infrastructure.
General practice amongst the box office geeks is to assume marketing is EQUAL to the production budget for a big blockbuster.
There's a lot of meta- to the film about the process, state of Hollywood, big cinema, giving in to retelling the same story for nostalgia bros, from what I understand. (I am not a critic or terribly deep, just observing)
I mean this clip speaks volumes. That unmistakable look of "Why'd you have to ask me that" as she is presumably self censoring thinking about what she /should/ be saying.
I would have bought 3 tickets to this, but watched it on HBO instead.
They wouldn't -have paid- anything, HBO is owned by Warner too
edit: ...they wouldn't have to have paid anything..
Conversely if they want it to be a windfall for some reason they charge HBO idiotic amounts of money for the distro rights, which HBO will happily pay because Warner tells them to do so.
That's exactly hollywood accounting.
I have no idea if it was actually 'done' to the matrix here.
sorry, yeah I agree, this is a better way of saying that
That.
There's also the matter of "marketing costs" which also help out the parent company.
So, of the $190 million that the movie cost, some of it was raised from WB, but some of it also went back to WB. From the outside it's really hard to say when they come out even.
Everyone should do themselves a favor and pay for a CPA firm (not just your friend that happens to be a CPA), learn some things just treat it as expensive education.
Its very different doing exploratory stuff with a CPA, compared to needing a CPA last minute for a problem you already have. They have excerpts from journals they are subscribed to that can inspire you about things you didnt know.
CPAs are good at math and accounting and generally quite bad at reading and applying the law. Use a CPA for your tax filings, and use a tax lawyer for anything that involves complexity. Tax law is administrative law, so a lot of things that would apply to criminal law doesn't apply (for example, tax strategies can retroactively be deemed illegal, taxpayers can be penalized for violating the spirit of the rules despite adhering to the text of the rules, etc.).
I would say make enough money for appeals court!
Bump that to at least $10,000 if you wind up putting down a retainer for a tax lawyer.
But CPAs are just as excited to research the same stuff and can give you the same answers, and their sign off on some activities can have some weight.
It gets easier to rationalize when you follow my simple mantra: do things worth litigating over.
Rules out lots of other ways to waste your time.
Has the marriage concluded in divorce/death yet? Otherwise I'm not sure how much weight should be placed in that recommendation ;)
https://www.slashfilm.com/503174/lucasfilm-tells-darth-vader...
IP Holder the rights to a movie. Production Studio S to make the movie for a fee. Distributor D distributes the movie for a fee.
Most people think that Production Studio S is the company that records the profits from the movie, but they generally don't see anything beyond their costs associated with actually making the film. In the old days, Production Studio S also got saddled with all the costs associated with the movie, including distribution costs paid to the distributor; now this is usually only the case for independently financed movies. Naive talent and investors, or independent film investors, make their profit sharing agreements with Production Studio S.
IP Holder owns the rights to the movie, and generally is the one that records the profits to the movie. These days, this entity is rarely the same entity that made the movie, but for independent films, this entity is usually the same as the Production Studio S.
If Distributor owns IP Holder, they will usually put expenses into this entity instead of Production Studio S because...sophisticated talent and investors make their profit sharing agreements with IP Holder (and Production Studio S won't see much income, so that's a moot point). Distributor can suck out the profits by increasing the fee charged to IP Holder for distribution services, which includes marketing. IP Holder sees a lot of expenses, and it may take years (or over a decade) to record a profit, so the highest-tier talent and investors make gross point profit sharing agreements, meaning that their profit share is based on the movie's pre-expense earnings rather than on net (post-expense) earnings (but only the highest tier talent and investors get to do this, see e.g., Sandra Bullock and Gravity).
Note: when I was at a firm, my clients included both one of the big studios and a number of the smaller studios, so the above is a very simplified version of the accounting structuring.
The recent scuff-up between Scarlett Johannson and Disney was an example, and the rumors of Disney being unwilling and to work with her was the quod-pro-quo rearing it’s head.
Even with the fact that it was used to inspire people to sign for HBO max, I'm going to guess it's not a success if those two numbers are true. I don't know how much more legs it's got but rough rule of thumb is the films' grosses need to roughly double the film's budget to be a success.
Not sure if she was trying to burn cash on purpose as performance art but I wouldn't put it past her either
But the film we saw in theaters is not the quality version of that meta-textual film, it is often very confusing with poor writing, execrable action scenes, and plot that is far less clever than its ambitions. Some of the dialogue sounded like the crummy lines from modern Hollywood superhero and other blockbuster movies, a far cry from the at least tonally-consistent writing of the original films.
I think I looked past it when it came out because I was a kid, and the world building was interesting to me.
This third sequel is knowingly a self-parody, but imo its sins are a mix of the old (ponderous self-seriousness) and the new (unsubtle modern blockbuster cringe- "hey did you hear that everyone who served with him died?" "I was... shook."). This new one just feels lacking in the taste or sophistication of the previous ones.
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/11/keanu-reeves-matrix-4-rehe...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbXSLzrs38Y
https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/rqh76p/the_matrix_4...
That aside, I do think the pandemic likely messed a whole lot of the production, which explains how the action got so lackluster.
The movies and the production of them? Yes.
The concept and story? No.
> Did she honestly ruin it on purpose?
Yes. I think she did.
One thing I admire about the Wachowskis is their insane ambition. You either hate it or love it but let's not pretend like they were just lucky.
Tons of people loved the matrix, just let it be.
Even from a "cinematic universe" or "canon" perspective I don't recognize its ability to affect the previous story; we're living in a rapidly accelerating era of media where escapism commands huge money and nostalgia is king; who's to say five or ten years down the line someone else might not make a new Matrix property and retcon the story as told in this one? Would be funny if Lilly Wachowski was the one to do that.
I’m not sure the Wachowski brand has improved after this.
What kind of person (allegedly) sinks a movie franchise out of spite?
How about… Not do that and put effort into everything you do?
IDK. Not sure I buy this and think it’s possible the Wachowskis that made the first movies are gone, and this was a good effort. ♬don’t let money change ya♬.
it's not spite. She didn't "sink" it because she was spiteful, she wanted to say something about the films and her work and chose to deconstruct the act of making a sequel to a trilogy after 20 years. It's their art, they can do what they want with it.
Their work since Matrix has always been avant-guard (Cloud Atlas is barely a film in any normal sense, a Speed Racer film by anyone else isn't _that_) they were never coming back to make another stock science-fiction action film.
The real question is, how did Warner green-light the script and release knowing that it was going say all those things.
Is it spite to not want your baby to become another Marvel/Star Wars clusterjerk? Perhaps it is, but I think she's allowed that. I don't think the world needs more of those, but it will always need more art and critique.
Everyone on here dancing around that possibility due to...reasons.
I don’t see this movie as an outlier. TV and Film have been in trouble since BLM and now with China buying AMC, the prospects don’t look good.
As as a (former) movie goer I’ve seen nothing but shit for the last 2 years. I now suspect shit is the new normal. I’m not paying for shit… it’s that simple. In other words, I agree with you.
The new Morpheus was just nothing. What a waste. Really, the casting in the original was one of the things that made it. Agent Smith, the Architect, each of these actors looked and sounded like their character. The casting in the new Matrix was just all over the place. Never did care for Trinity though.
New Neo is blue haired girl. New Trinity is tattooed girl. New Neo and New Trinity are not yet lovers (which appeases the CCP) but the final scene shows them embracing behind Old Neo/Trinity.
I don’t think I read that wrong and thought it was pretty obvious?
It’s simply one in a long line of offerings from Hollywood that is not meeting viewer expectations. I see it as a cumulative effect.
... And my reasons are clear.
So I don't know why you thought it was amazing.
Totally believable to me that the filmmakers just “dialed-it-in” for a pile of money without caring for the story. After all they were already “done” after the first movie. Too bad. Tragically, that same pile of money could have funded a dozen innovative new filmmakers and actors with fresh stories to tell.
Not unlike the latest Spiderman with how much it tried to reference from the others in the collection, but the constant flashovers to the originals were a bit exhausting.
Was tough to watch. I mean, I got it…but it was tough to watch.
Or it could just be these tweets: https://twitter.com/lilly_wachowski/status/12621047544963399...
short answer: the matrix is gender.
but it also represents any social construct pretty generically, and that's why there's so much confusion.
long answer: duck duck go matrix transgender.
also, like, when a creator tells you their work means a thing, just take them at their word. they would know. you can criticize how well or how poorly it conveys the meaning, or explore what subterfuge is concealed within, but questioning explicit intent is a bit silly.
This is reductive.
I'm not questioning their intent, I'm questioning whether they successfully expressed that intent in the movie.
Trans people noticed the parallels. I don't think they intended everyone would. They wanted to do more with it too. Switch's Matrix form was supposed to be male.
As Don Quixote once said "El Oh El"
In a way, you can say that everyone who is an HBO subscriber has already paid for the Matrix Resurrections. Obviously you don't have to watch it immediately, since it's now part of the streaming service catalogue, so unlike a movie theater where all people who intend to see the movie must watch it before it leaves the cinema, all HBO max subscriber can just think: cool new matrix, I should watch that eventually, and continue being happy subscriber even if they don't watch it yet (like me).
So for me, this is building a catalogue. I'm sure they have things like immediate conversion, how many subbed and The Matrix Resurrection was their first thing they watched, etc.
But basically, I think it's a very different formula, and it's probably a lot harder to figure out what success means and how important The Matrix Resurrection is to HBO Max's growth and continued subs.
Yet clearly market forces have spoken: the desirability and convenience of the "club goods" model is strong enough to overwhelm any advantages of the transaction model; and the streaming services clearly believe their usage data and analytics are good enough to give them reliable correlations with subscriber acquisition and retention, so they can decide what to license and produce. (While telemetry surely helps, it's worth noting that HBO made this model work for decades based solely on surveys and brand cachet.)
See also: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2822-the-people-s-republic-...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
In terms of figuring out their own cash flow, most of these sorts of subscription services divvy up the subscription fee from each customer between everything that customer consumed from the service during the month. So if you've paid a $10 monthly fee and then only watch one movie, the company interprets that as you paying $10 to watch that movie. If you watch two movies, then you've paid $5 to watch each movie. (maybe with a skew favouring the longer movie or the newer release, depending on their own business logic)
That approach would make it pretty easy for them to figure out a reasonable internal estimate of how much money a particular movie has earned the company via their subscription service. Although that's all fungible internal money and who knows how they'd want to report it, if at all.
They never share viewership numbers to the producers, and they don't pay by the actual viewership , they buy the property and do internal P&L on success of the buy as you say.
From the producers perspective it only matters how much Netflix paid for a movie.
This conversation is about a company that's released their movie to theatres and is simultaneously streaming it via their own subscription streaming service, and trying to figure out how to account for money earned by the movie when some of that money may or may not be coming in via subscription fees on the streaming service.
In that specific case (the one being discussed in this thread), the 'internal' numbers should be fine to use since they're all happening inside a single company -- both the royalties on theatrical ticket sales and the streaming subscription fees.
There's no "sharing viewership numbers" with external parties implied in my comment above, and Netflix is not involved in this situation in any way.
Even if the numbers are available, This way of accounting is too simple to apportion revenue and is flawed.
The power of platforms (or studios / back catalogues) is that sum of the whole is greater than individual property. That is why consolidation happens all time in the industry. Most people are not paying for a subscription because they watch specific content[1].
For example If I watch only one movie this month and 10 next month , isn't it more accurate to split my 2 month fees by 11 rather than giving all my first month fees to first movie ?. Me not watching anything else should not increase the value of the content I did watch based on an arbitrary time period (billing cycle of a month)
[1] ignoring the cases additional cost for a new movie that is direct revenue.
I looked it up, it's available for a month for ad-free subscribers.
It'll probably be available again in a year or two also of course.
Other things I loved without getting too specific:
+bullet time rewind +Trinity's fresh eyes after nearly dying +the ballet of the helicopters +Sati +Sati's wink +the design of the Anomaleum +holding hands in the sky +army in a coffee shop +the music when the dojo gets initiated +the view from the prison cell +bathroom stall encounter of grandeur and hilarity!
I'm sure I'm missing twice as much amazing things but these are just off the top of my head.
If only. Alas, I doubt it.
This is not "amazing" it's hack writing and made no sense. Unfortunately that set the tone for the rest of the movie.
Having watched it I still don't think I could really explain it to someone else.
Axiom: You can only see The Matrix for the first time, once.
> I still know kung fu
THE MATRIX IS SINGULAR
The ending cover song of RATM's "Wake Up" was just something else.
Not so much a "troll", but there's a scene in the first act that literally lays out the entire premise of the production and the creator's feelings about feeling forced to do it.
There are "lampshade hanging" fourth-wall breaks in the production meeting scenes that make Deadpool look conservative.
The Wachowskis didn't want to do more Matrix. Warner were going to do more Matrix regardless, so Lana Wachowski decided to do it herself and use it to deconstruct both their own movies and reboot/nostalgia cinema in general (looking at you Force Awakens, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Space Jam et al)
I actually really enjoyed the first ~half of the movie, even laughed out loud a couple of times (esp the 'warner bros will make the game with or without us so we'd better just take on the job').
The second half of action-soup was, for me at least, boring and as far as I can tell nonsensical.
I think the movie would have done a lot better without trying to redo any of the gunplay/holodeck-type fantasy, and instead stuck to the more grounded storyline from the first half.
At this point we need commentary in the popular culture on reboots, there is enough grist in that mill for 2 hours at least.
This is also just a really good evolution from the central conflict of the first three films which is basically like "technology = bad, but we need it". This film shows us "technology can be bad, but we can work together with it to build something beautiful and brighter". Really good evolution there.
I think what ultimately sank the movie for a lot of fans was the Agent Smith actor was replaced. Too bad.
I find it very odd that people swear the themes wouldn't work today.
The corporate drone thing was specifically a reference to what life was like _for software developers_ in the late 90s. This looks a lot different now than it did then. For the average person, sure, your quip about amazon workers is quite apt. My point though is now we have all the same issues, but with a fake sort of "culture" icing pasted on top that makes a lot of things seem substantiative, real, and anti-corporate, when they in fact are not. Things are much subtler now. It also shows a lot of what we've lost -- "hacker" culture used to be integral to being a developer, hence Neo's "double life" as a software developer and a hacker.
These days people barely even pirate things anymore. There has been a mass acceptance of the status quo that is pervasive, dangerous, and wasn't present in the previous era. So while people wore suits back in the day, back in the day was also the wild west of tech. That has largely ended.
Another way of looking at it: in the 90s and early 00s, there was lots of sub-culture and counter-culture present, especially in the tech and "hacker" communities. These days, our corporate overlords have co-opted the term "hacker" and try to sound edgy and "counter-culture" by simply occupying the spaces legitimate counter-culture movements used to occupy (corporate sponsored hackathons, bug bounties, a lot of marketing stuff, etc). So this new matrix movie, for me, partially demonstrates the death of counter-culture, as it was in the late 90s and early 00s. These days you can be the equivalent of the old-school corporate drone by doing a bunch of seemingly edgy "counter-culture" things, and the corporations want it that way. They want you to feel edgy, while staying well within the parameters they designed.
We're not seeing the Analyst create a Brave New World type subtle insidious dystopia that's a better reflection of our modern world. We're either told point-blank ("We realized the more angry you get, the more energy you create" is good commentary on social media, but it's told and not shown), and the only hint of digital soma is the shot of Keanu in the elevator surrounded by today's mixed-up teens on their electronic gizmos.
There's no interesting subversion like say the idea that Bugs' new resistance might be misguided in its activities, that the concept of the red pill might be archaic. That it's wrong to be worshipful towards Neo. There's no presentation of the captive humans as craving this new Matrix, of wanting to stay blue-pilled; instead they're zombies who are mind-controlled. There's no challenge to the old message. It's just the same Matrix with a shabby Corporate Memphis reskin.
This movie literally uses the word "sheeple". It's all so hamfisted and half-baked. It is not clever social commentary.
WB's been in pre-production on a new Matrix for years now, and maybe she saw the opportunity to use it.
I had reservations about it, and I was surprised how much I liked it and how on board I was with it.
I mean, it's not perfect, the third act is soft and there are plot-holes you can drive a truck through, but that wasn't the point and once I settled that, I found myself really enjoying it.
I honestly think I'd have been more down on it trying to be just another "Matrix" film
On the other hand, she has said in interviews that she was motivated by a personal loss to reach out and try to make it. Not sure who actually initiated trying to get the movie made as I've heard both versions now.
It’s what a revival should be: it gives you a way to observe the original work from a radically different perspective, while still building on it. The only other revival that’s done it better has been Twin Peaks: The Return.
The writers made this part of the plot of the repeating inner world. Between that moment and the painful scenes of the game designers' cyclic rounds of buzzword bingo, I agree that the movie was at least trolling the WB executives.
In my mind that's undeniably true. The question I want to know is why was the rest of the movie so bad, was that also bad on purpose or just poor execution?
Definitely wish the ambiguity of the first act was stretched a bit further though, that was my favorite part.
They could have played that note all the way to the end. They could also have triple down on matrix cliches awesomely to reconstruct it. But they fell is some shitty middle ground.
Man, they could have called it matrix: reconstruction and then done literally that.
Edit: I felt that while watching it. The scene where he enters the mirror and finds Neil Patrick Harris was a really compelling moment. I suspect there was a moment in the writing process where neo blue pills at that point instead. Sigh…
Yeah, rather than the happy ending, kind of wish that Neo lost, was recaptured, and went right back into game designer life, leaving the audience feeling ambiguous about the whole film.
This movie doesn't know what to be.
I would be interested in understanding how the increased revenue in HBO Max streaming subscriptions balances out against the one-time loss they had for big-budget releases in 2021.
Another wrinkle is the movie format itself is under attack. Dune for example should have been a weekly series. There just isn't enough time to do it right in a movie.
The movie is a trailer for the books.
It's as good as it could ever be, considering it was in the making for 40 years [0].
[0] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/dune...
Overall, there's no way this movie lost money.
Do you have links to those essays? I would love to
The new sequel did a really good job of adding nuance and deepening the themes already present in the trilogy. Specifically the way systems define our reality as a means of control. It did so while tying in really well with the first films world-building, expanding on more nuanced understanding of AI/programs that the sequels started to explore.
The film did take some time to reclaim its narrative, but I think it did so in a way that most fans can appreciate.
I believe that it's an achievement for the film to garner this much discussion. If anything, the film predicts it.
----
I think people have fallen into two camps, and it depends how you saw the first film. I loved Matrix, not for the wire-fu, gunplay and special effects, but for all the subtext and "simulacra and simulation" of it all. It was film that very cleverly pulled together a lot concepts that had been done in 90s cinema about depersonification, reality and identity and presented them in an incredibly unique way.
If you liked Matrix for the wire-fu gunplay, Resurrections isn't your film, it does spend most of its time "shitting on the original" but that was the point. It's a deconstruction of "genre cinema" rebooting/remaking their successes to re-engage and revive a franchise.
Maybe they’ll even give it a positive review and good word of mouth to completely negate the director’s intention to undermine Warner Bros.
At least the movie says it right up front with the dialogue between Neo and Smith, "This is a total sellout and nobody wants to do it but parent company wants some money."
The only thing missing was the two of them looking directly at the audience behind the fourth wall in awkward synchronized silence.
That said, Art that wishes itself never born is not art I care to watch.
Tenet made plenty of money in worldwide box office sales, not counting DVD/Blu-Ray or streaming: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Tenet-(2020) "worldwide box office is 1.8 times production budget"
Raya (budget $100m) also made money in theaters alone (worldwide box office $116m) despite being released in March 2021. Phew, I was going to be sad for a moment that Raya was some kind of failure, as if being included in a list that contained the new Space Jam movie wasn't bad enough.
Whoever wrote this article doesn't seem to know what they are talking about.
Never, ever, invest in a movie. You will have better luck with lottery tickets.
The second and third acts were mangled by a lot of unnecessary throwbacks.
My favourite example is this one:
https://wegotthiscovered.com/?s=emma+watson+reportedly&submi...
They add "reportedly" just to any article that's 100% invented by them. Emma Watson was never approached to do any Harry Potter film, there were no talks to do them, etc, etc, etc. And I put that example because that's the one I am more familiar with (I am very deep in the Harry Potter fandom), but I have seen reports by them from all franchises with clear lies.
Same goes to Alternative Nation (a music site), but it's worse than WGTC. It uses GoDaddy firewall to block access from my country. Not that I'm willing to put effort to get in, though, as it's as terrible as WGTC.
I would've rather they had just cut out all of that and turned this into a mystery or psychological thriller, instead of trying to force action scenes that just look embarrassingly bad.
Applies to The Matrix at least as much as it applies to the movie it came from.
I think it did poorly because the movie was just plain bad, and the omicron variant is reaching a peek just as movies theaters were getting people to come back.
In other words, its pretty unlikely the theatrical run yielded a profit.
Also the $200 million production budget does not include promotion/advertising.
So it's very unlikely that Tenet made a profit at the box office, however there's streaming deals, physical media etc which can earn a pretty penny, particularly if something becomes a cult classic. Blade Runner and Starship Troopers were box office failures having has made lots of money afterwards.
Did OK given the circumstances but it wasn't a big financial win.
But I whole heartedly agree that the new Star Wars films are an absolute travesty.
Suicide Squad can take on maybe 2 or 3 Justice League heroes at a time, at best, not the entire team's collective focus. They're just completely incomparable in terms of threat-level, size or scope.
Space army, hyperspace travel / technology, in depth knowledge of the mysteries of the universe.
But yeah, a giant starfish Looks can be decieving.
The trailer looked very promising, a nice sci-fi noir dealing with memory and identity, but the reviews for it have been horrid. So much for Hollywood trying new ideas.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-53692435
That killed my interest in it because I didn't want to see a message movie. I liked the earlier movies because of the Science Fiction and people like Elon Musk asking "Are we living in a simulation?". That's fun. I also watch movies to escape into a couple hours of enjoyable fantasy and get away from daily issues. I couldn't watch "Don't Look Up" for the same reason.
That's one of the reasons the original was so smart; it worked on multiple levels, letting you have your cake (escapism/fantasy/action movie) and eat it too (the message that makes you think long after seeing it).
I could keep doing this for every part of the movie but you get the picture. And it’s all canon.
There are movies built around a social issue like Philedelphia or Leaving Las Vegas, but I think the filmmaker needs to use gritty realism. Trying to steer The Matrix Science Fiction movies in that direction about trans I thought would probably be a disaster.
I'd have peferred them to explain how Neo was able to use the "force" against the machines, see their energy while blind, and who's the Zero. Expected a replica of Neo to be used by the machines or something in the lines of "don't be evil" becomes evil, as a critique to modern tech.
Waiting for the HBO release next month.
Surprisingly, I haven't finished it yet. But I will. We never know, maybe it turns out to be a good surprise by the end.
I think the IMDb rating 5.7/10 speaks volumes why it's crashing.
that ship had sailed
This movie wasn't successfully either smart or dumb.
The dominant theory is that Wachowski intentionally sabotaged the film to spite the studio for some reason.
Warner Brothers isn’t going to hand $200 million over to any single person and just be like “well, I guess we get what we get!”.
i don't think you'll find that in a film
edit: and the third one at least looked like some advanced level of Galaga, and that was pretty alright.
Cloud Atlas is one of my favorite films of all time. It's incredibly divisive, but if you appreciate its deep symbolism and rich interwoven storytelling, it's beautiful. The wide dynamic range of genres it attempts to fit - romance, comedy, science fiction, murder mystery, spy thriller - is not only ambitious, but absolutely works to establish the symphony of it all.
Resurrections surpasses the mediocre second and third Matrix films and manages to troll both the studio and the audience in a deliberately tongue in cheek, yet equally trippy way. It's clever for working with the tools they had.
V for Vendetta and Cloud Atlas are absolute masterpieces. Definitely Top 10.
The sheer extravagance at least was on par with the Harkonens.
Beyond that, the plot of "reborn woman gets to be a planet-princess and then goes back to scrubbing toilets" was completely stupid. The Bureaucracy scene was funny though.
I also liked Matrix 2 and 3.
watchable i guess. just don't go out of your way to watch it.
If you like Spider-Man or marvel you’ll enjoy it
Sequels are even harder to impress fans and critics these days. Always better to ignore and cut through the hype as the opposite just happens.
I just couldn't understand how someone who was as much as a perfectionist when it came to groundbreaking movie making would poop out something so unpolished and cheap looking. The lighting was uninspired, the choreography was lazy, the camera work was exceptionally amateur, and shaky-cam, really?!
When I saw the bus scene from Shang-Chi, that was the level of work and detail I was expecting when they were on that Tokyo train.