Village Roadshow Entertainment has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection
latimes.com
latimes.com
Village Roadshow put into development 99 feature films, 166 scripted television series and 67 unscripted series. Of those, six movies and seven television series went into production.
In the music biz we used to call this "write a word, take a third." I've never asked what the Hollywood equivalent is. Every production gets enshittified.
There are mountains of supremely talented people in Hollywood, but an equal amount of totally untalented chucklefucks with money and connections to screw everything up.
Maybe the AI will put production back into the hands of the talent. Their scripts will go unmolested by talentless moneyed hacks.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TorchTheFranchis...
Matrix 4 was interesting in that it seemed to leave The Matrix Online canon (the Wachowskis seem earnest in trusting there cross-media plays in the franchise to be/remain canon) but didn't answer some of the old questions. On the other hand it did deliver a few nice things.
But yes a Warner Brothers execute hoping to boot up a Matrix branded money printer would not have had the sense to talk to anyone previously involved in The Matrix Online, despite owning Monolith (RIP), Matrix 4 was never really about continuing the story to the people demanding "we need a Matrix 4 by such and such quarter".
But Warner Brothers itself wanted a big tentpole release, and insisted Matrix be it. (Even though it wouldn't really fit that mold)
The Matrix 4 itself, even mentions how the demands on the release were ridiculous and wouldn't work (it's not 1999 anymore, you can't just re-do 1999 and expect it to work).
The Matrix 4 film itself is really good (IMHO), as a huge fan of the original stories and lore, it moves the universe forward in a way that feels authentic to the original trilogy, it reunites old characters, makes charming and thoughtful new ones, and it remains authentic and true to the original romance underpinning the whole thing. The lack of Hugo Weaving/Laurence Fishburne, and a little bit of dated action fights is the only real bummer I can think of.
The problem is that the film is only good, and not mind-crushingly great. And what everyone seemed to want out of this, was a guaranteed 300+ mil smash hit at box.
If they had released it to theaters, I don't think it would have made that. But it 'only' cost $190 million to make (Matrix 2 was 265m in 2024 dollars), and I think Matrix 4 would have done at least $200 mil total at box, if it had a theatrical release (for comparison, The Marvels is another 'good-but-not-great' SciFi action film, and grossed $206 million at box).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Roadshow
The Australian company owned 3% of the American Village Roadshow.
> "The breach of contract lawsuit against Warner Bros. came after the studio introduced “The Matrix Resurrections” in December 2021 on its HBO Max streaming service the same day the film was released in movie theaters. Village Roadshow complained that the Burbank studio’s pivot away from an exclusive theatrical release had destroyed the value of a key franchise."
-- how is that true? Did they lose that much box office money on Matrix Resurrections that cashflow or lack of revenues made them collapse?
> “A confluence of macro-economic factors have weighed heavily on the company’s balance sheet,”
-- Now we're getting somewhere. An unbalanced budget? What might have caused it I wonder? Would they have a worse time than the other studios or have less cash reserves etc?
A shame the article doesn't give many answers. Would love to know.
eddy murphy called it "monkey points"
But yes 99% correlated to having no ability to repay.
Its possible they expect a countersuit to win. Or they borrowed to much to pay lawyers.
One retailer I liked blamed “shifting consumer demand for their demise but they also doubled their store count by like 100 within two years. Consumer demand did shift but they also legitimately f’d up.
The decision to release product against Village Roadshows wishes feels like potential breach of contract stuff but this is now water under the bridge.
I wonder if the bond completion insurance side of this is also now a bit underwater: money in films is strange and all kinds of people and their two-and-a-half employee company could be affected. Feel a bit sad for industry people who lose their shirt in this.
Aka I like Chris Pratt or the Rock just fine but one movie a year is enough??
(I really liked both movies by the way).
The action sequences and set pieces were absolutely lackluster and downright boring despite the film's budget. (Not sure if this is due to the age of the actors - the John Wick series seems to have figured this out just fine.)
Most damning of all, the story arc, character arcs, and final resolution were phoned in and utterly forgettable. It's tragic, given the ludicrously audacious start of the film. The setup was there, but there was no investment beyond the trick premise.
Lana swung for the fences but struck out. It felt like an M. Night Shyamalan letdown.
I liked the reimagining of agent smith ("the man") from an unnamed government agent to a tech bro. The conversation about the new matrix being made "with or without" the original creator was a great fuck you to whoever was pulling those strings.
I wanted them to add another couple layers to the mind fuckery. We're used to watching the matrix and knowing which scenes are in the matrix and which are in the real world. Mess with that. Reveal halfway through that the "real world" scenes we've seen so far (in 4, not the previous movies) have actually been in the matrix.
In my ideal world, the climax would've been Neo realizing that he's been dead the whole movie, existing as a manifestation of the free machines, giving them individuality and choice the same way that agent smith took away human individuality and choice in 3. Trinity can still be saved, but Neo can never go with her to the real world.
According to some readings of the film, the climax is Neo realizing that he's been dead (at least figuratively) the whole movie. Those are the readings that Neo and Trinity are the same character and Neo is as much or more the "deadname"/"dead inside" parts. Matrix 4 did a bunch of work for those readings.
I still don’t know why she even agreed. The pay check?
If they wanted to bring it back, they should have discarded all the previous stuff besides the basic premise. The original movie even had this whole thing about Neo being the sixth “The One”.
That’s 5 prequels right there. And the obvious exploration of what happened after the reboot.
Trying to bring back the cast except as a way to hand over the franchise (by dying) is almost always going to be stupid.
She put it bluntly in the first 15 minutes, in meeting scene.
Only when the reveal is done and the action starts does it begin to fall apart as a lackluster story with subpar motivations and arcs.
Until that point it's a fantastic mindfuck.
If they'd simply left it as a drama with no action at all and focused more on character development, it could have been amazing.
...now the packet in front of you has our focus group research inside you'll find the breakdown including key word association with the brand the top two being originality and fresh which i think are great things to keep in mind as you begin working on matrix four and who knows how many more...
She has explicitly said in interviews they told her they would make it with or without her, so she made it crap on purpose to tank the franchise. It was supposed to suck.
> Village Roadshow complained that the Burbank studio’s pivot away from an exclusive theatrical release had destroyed the value of a key franchise.
Just ask the executives what kind of movie they have in mind
Didn’t she write the movie? And pitch the idea?
Why would she pitch a movie just to purposely make it horrible? If she was forced to make a movie, why not make it good? Or at least not one of the worst movies I’ve seen in years?
The take you mentioned seems more like after the fact justifications for making a horrible film.
On a serious not The Matrix was a fine film with fantastic effects but on a scale of Punch & Depth per $ spent on production Dark City delivered more bang per buck.
They are definitely related, and I also think Dark City was the better version of Matrix 1 on a storytelling and aesthetics level, Matrix's innovative effects aside, but then I like all of the Matrix sequels a lot more than I like the first Matrix film.
If you like late 90's / early 2000's M. Night Shyamalan, the first half of the film is brilliant. But after the reveal it falls apart like the last season of Game of Thrones. It's as if Lana stopped caring.
It would have been fantastic to have timed it with the release of the Matrix MMO game. It's as if that had been the plan all along.
The healthy revenue from long box office legs and DVD sales has died thanks to streaming. And the youth that would rather get their dopamine fix elsewhere.
But the streaming wars have done incredible damage to this once thriving industry.
Amazon and Apple have come in and subsided their own studios from unrelated business units. (Where is antitrust?) They're teaching consumers that the price of movies is free.
Does anyone know: Did the dispute with Warner Brothers cause the digs against Warner Brothers in the Resurrections script, or vice versa, or were they both caused by something else, or were they unrelated?
- The dispute was after the movie released.
- Only one of the Wachowskis could be convinced to come back.
- WB had tried and failed at least once getting a new Matrix movie off the ground after Revolutions without the Wachowskis.
- The Matrix Resurrections features the line "[Warner Bros. are] going to do it with or without us."
More background: https://ew.com/movies/matrix-resurrections-scene-doing-seque...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/joker-matrix-producer-files-b...