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.
Any reason to believe that this is an instance of Hollywood Accounting? At a glance, wikipedia says the film cost $190m, which seems reasonable for a film like this, and only received $124.5m in box office sales. Conversely, wikipedia lists Harry Potter OotP as a "150–200 million" budget on $942m in box office sales.
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?
You can get a rough idea by using Netflix’ impact value figure, the formula of which isn’t public but appears to be about seven times the number who watched at least two minutes of the title in the first month. (This is based on the leaked documents about Squid Game’s performance, and again, the real formula is surely more complicated. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/netflixs-squid-game-is-repor...)
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.
More money isn't just new subscriptions, it's also revenue from existing subscriptions (which can be cancelled any time).
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".
I watched the movie via HBO Max. I’m sure that on one set of calculations (HBO), a good chunk of my monthly fee is assigned to the Matrix Resurrections account. But on another set of calculations (Warner Bros), I’m a negative because I would have likely gone to see it in a theater.
While I can't answer your question, just using a calculation like "box office receipts" - "movie making expense" is surely disingenuous. In that case every single direct-to-netflix release would be considered a money loser.
They had a deal for home streaming simultaneously with the box office release. This means that yes it is highly likely that far more people streamed this movie than movies that do theater-exclusive releases.
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.
The point isn’t that there are 2 revenue streams instead of 1, is that they own it forever and there will be unlimited ways to make money on it over a long enough timeline.
For a film, the present value of the unlimited future revenue is only a single digit multiple of its short term box office. Perhaps low doubles given the proportion of release attention accumulated on HBO Max.
I'm not sure the specific licensing agreement between HBO and Warner Bros, but it's likely they agreed upon a flat fee with additional $ per viewer. I don't think these deals would ever hinge solely on how many new subscribers joined the platform specifically to view that movie, which would be difficult to prove anyway.
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.
That doesn't mean that there isn't a contract between HBO and Warner Studios involved for this, as crazy as it sounds. It doesn't mean that there definitively is one, either -- but depending on how the different divisions are structured, HBO may well be paying Warner for the streaming rights.
My impression is that this sort of deal -- where the production arm may well shop around a product to different networks/services, even if the parent company actually owns one -- is becoming less common as nearly everyone's starting their own streaming service, but AFAIK it still happens, particularly for movies.
I have always assumed those numbers are fudged, and included marketing.
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).
Yes. And the equipment. And the studio spaces. And the a-list actors/dir3ctors/producers who took home many millions each. 200million was once an insane budget (Waterworld) but with movies these day grossing into the billions (Endgame et al) 200mil is no longer a stretch.
Well, the total cost was reported as $190 million, so after the 1000 people get 100k, there is still 90mil to account for...
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.
Reeves was paid 10 to 14 million for this movie. That is base salary before other stuff, before his costs. So in terms of the budget, he alone is probably about 10% of the total cost to make this movie.
TV shows are really pushing things too. Twenty years ago, a big budget show was a premium cable production like Deadwood ($4.5M/episode) or Rome ($8.5M/episode), but now you have mainline shows like The Crown, Stranger Things, and The Mandalorian, all costing $12M+/episode.
And product placement and revenue generating content masquerading as entertainment content has shot through the roof, too.
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>
Quality CGI is certainly not free. Pixar movies are all CGI but are still quite expensive productions because it require a lot of work by many highly skilled professional.
Just take a look at the credits at the end of a blockbuster movie to see how many specialized skills are required.
Sure thing, I get that. There are around 1500 people listed as being involved in the making of the matrix resurrections. That is a lot of people. But I'd bet that the vast majority of them did not work on it full time, for over 6 months each:
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.
The largest crew is during "principal photography" which is when the live action scenes are filmed (i.e. involves actors on sets or location). This takes a few months for an average movie, longer for a complex shoot like the Matrix. It seem to have been four months according to the your quote. But the whole production takes a lot longer. Pre-production with storyboarding, planning, casting, set-design, costume design etc. starts a long time before filming. The Matrix was probably in pre-production for at least a year. And after principal photography we have post-production (editing, music, sound, color grading etc.). Traditionally CGI was applied in post-production, but todays blockbuster movies are basically CGI throughout with the live action scenes composited into the CGI. Post-production seem to have takes about a year for the Matrix.
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.
Keep in mind that credits usually only list people that worked directly on the noticeable parts of a movie (actors, producers, graphics, audio, editing, cameras, marketing, hair/makeup, etc) but not those who work in the background to allow those people to do their work (IT, food services, electricians, janitors, truck drivers, crane operators, finance, hr, lawyers, etc).
It seems like it wasn't marketed very much: I didn't realize it was in production, about to be released, or... released. I just happened to see it online ready to watch one day and watched 2/3rds of it before giving up.
Sony said "come Wachowski's, we are going to make a new Matrix, with or without you." And then the dump truck showed up and she did what she could to, in her mind, make a product she was happy with that she knew she had to make for herself.
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.
Warners intentionally released every 2021 film simultaneously on HBO Max in an attempt to drive subscriptions. It's likely impossible to attribute marginal subscriptions to a specific film on a service that offers thousands of them plus episodic television, but long run, if the service doesn't die and competes reasonably well with Disney+ and Netflix to drive up AT&T's market value for decades into the future, especially if other telecoms and ISPs start to dwindle in the face of disruption, it's worth it to lose accounting profit on a few specific wide releases for a year or two.
No, they'd have paid exactly what they want to. If they want the movie to make no profit, they'll charge HBO nothing, or perhaps they'd have the gall to have _HBO charge the movie studio part of warner_ a fee for showing it on HBO, perhaps filing that away as 'marketing expenses' or some similar scam. Anybody with monkey points (entitled to a cut of the net earnings) is out of luck.
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.
This reminds me of my dad’s story at work on time. He worked at a mill and the higher ups had a meeting with everyone. They said due to the high pricing of logs currently we are thinking we have to lay some guys off we didn’t want it to come as a surprise. My dad spoke up and said you own this division and the logging division. You set the price of the logs. You are telling us you charge yourself too much for logs and now we are going to lose work? There was union talk of a mill wide strike if they did it and they ended up not laying anyone off.
The long tail of box office receipts, especially internationally, is always interesting, as are licensing deals. Maybe they find a way to protect those with other subsidiaries.
Hollywood Accounting, as I understand it, entails having a separate production company for each movie. That company then buys services from the parent company, something like a franchisee. Some of those services may be inflated. All of the costs incurred by the production company will be paid off before anyone gets residuals.
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.
You don't need Hollywood accounting when the expenses exceed the revenue, you can still pocket the revenue for yourself though. You can just stagger things across tax years.
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.
I think this is great advice, since the first few years of my tax career were spent helping people deal with all the crap that CPAs got them into.
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 typically ask the CPA for supporting literature and case law if it exists
And gravitate towards the things that have durable consensus or more easily rationalizable consensus
But those kinds of requests during the first consultations make it pretty obvious if you want to work with them. If their whole business is just filing 1040-EZ’s for people with the standard deduction and collecting child tax credits, then they wont be prepared and you can rule them out.
What do you look for as their specialty? Is there a size of firm that you look for? Any key terms that you zero in on that would indicate that they do this type of work? Also how do you actually find a these ? Seems like a Google search won’t exactly bring up the right caliber folks.
"I get these occasional letters from Lucasfilm saying that we regret to inform you that as Return of the Jedi has never gone into profit, we've got nothing to send you."
Dumb question: how is Hollywood accounting not fraud? I know there have numerous civil court cases over differences of "opinion" over incentive compensation calculations, but has anyone actually gone to jail?
Hollywood accounting doesn't change whether there are profits, it changes who records the profits.
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.
Part of the problem is that many of the people with a stake in the “higher profits” camp risk losing future opportunities. If you start to make a ruckus about contract profits you find yourself not employed by that studio, and you start to be looked over by other studios. It’s a shell game but everyone agrees to it so as to book another gig.
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.
What would you charge them with? They claim the costs for things like licensing and services are legitimate. How do you prove they aren't? What is the correct charge for a licence or service except for what two companies agree?
> We can add The Matrix Resurrections to that list, too, with the HBO Max hybrid barely scraping past $100 million globally since hitting the big screen and streaming on December 22, not ideal when the sci-fi actioner’s budget is estimated to be hovering around the $190 million mark.
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.
Hollywood Accounting is absolutely a real thing but that doesn't mean that movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and promote don't routinely lose huge amounts of money when they bomb.
I saw it twice. I honestly cannot tell if Lana Wachowski hates the Matrix or not. There was this meta montage of "oh we have to make a sequel to the Matrix because the suits wanted it, everybody pile on stupid crap", which was obviously a middle finger to...someone. I laughed out loud at how over the top that blatant F-U was...but given that the movie proceeded to then actually crap on every single thing that was awesome about the first Matrix (hey, Trinity is a literally a soccer Mom now? Morpheus is the most newly freed mind and completely unimportant? Smith is completely unintimidating? It's inexplicably set in 2020, not 1999 that was supposed to be the peak of human civilization?) Did she honestly ruin it on purpose?
I think so, or at least the film was very self-aware of the fact the Matrix as a movie franchise has exactly become what the Matrix in the original movie was, a repetitive, stagnant world that exists solely to suck the lifeforce out of its subjects. This is a critique that Baudrillard (whose work is featured in the original) actually had already of the original trilogy itself when he stated that "the matrix is the kind of movie that the matrix would come up with"
Not sure if she was trying to burn cash on purpose as performance art but I wouldn't put it past her either
The first time I saw Resurrections, I was lol'ing at the brainstorming montage, as I saw it as her explicitly sticking her finger in the eye of all the haters and crackheads out there. But the second time it was cringe. I mean, the first Matrix was this unabashedly bad-ass movie that was so fresh, and then by the time number 4 rolled around, it hates itself and everyone else so much that most of the screen time is spent just trying to get even...with whom? Screw those stupid critics; make a kick-ass movie that completely leaves those morons in the dust. Instead, the more I think about it, the more it just drags everything into the muck.
I think there's a way to make Matrix 4 that looks upon its own legacy and destroys that baggage, "kill your darlings" and all that, and even maybe many of the scenes filmed in this one could be present in that movie.
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 rewatched the original recently and that dialogue is not exactly a strong point either. Really devoid of subtly or even the barest hint of humor. A pretty unbelievable amount of exposition, telling rather than showing.
I think I looked past it when it came out because I was a kid, and the world building was interesting to me.
The original had the capacity to convey awe, for its time. The first sequel felt like the franchise was treading into Star Wars prequel territory- the danger of a fantasy disappearing into the self-seriousness of its own contrived, convoluted lore. By the time of the second sequel all was lost, it became self-parody in many points with oblique pointless philosophical meanderings, even subplots that were brought up to be instantly dropped (just what was up with the "eyes of the Oracle" anyway?).
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.
I recently learned that Baudrillard (author of "Simulacra and Simulation", referenced in the first Matrix) criticized the first film as being something that The Matrix would have produced itself, to feed its prisoners an illusory red pill. I can't help but wonder if Lana took that criticism to heart.
She lost people in her life, and used the resurrections of Neo and Trinity as a way to cope with the loss. Past that I think she didn't really care that much. Good for her, she got that paycheque nonetheless!
I loved "Alien." Just an awesome film. Over the years there have been several sequels and spinoffs. Probably more bad than good. But there's definitely been some good ones. I just spend less time thinking about the bad ones.
Apart from the first Matrix movie, which is amazing, have the Wachowskis actually made any other good movies? Was it just the case that they were surrounded by talented people in the first movie and listened to them? Then after it was successful they were like "we got this".
I really don't like this new movie, but it doesn't impact my enjoyment of the ones that came before. If I really cared to, I can just pretend that this movie doesn't exist, as people are fond of doing to the original two sequels.
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.
It was rumored that WB would have made another Matrix without Wachowski involvement if she had not agreed to it. Who knows how that would have turned out.
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.
It was really petty and I lost a lot of respect for her over this. She could have let WB fail on their own (proving what a masterstroke their first movie was), she could have outdone it (proving she's still a master), or she could have given a middling effort. All of which, IMHO, would have been better than intentionally sullying--frankly, ruining--the original piece.
Frankly I hope I can just forget the fourth movie, because I don't want to watch the first movie knowing that Neo ends up a doddering old pilled-up nutter and Trinity's a cookie cutter soccer mom with barely a bike shop. (and of course, that's silly, because they didn't really end up that way, they were put into that way--at great expense--for why again? stupid plot. Stupid, stupid plot.)
>What kind of person (allegedly) sinks a movie franchise out of spite?
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.
The reasons people seem to be dancing around is censorship. Woke ideology on one side and the CCP on the other. That’s an extremely narrow area to work in.
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.
What does this have to do with the movie? Even if I could imagine a scenario in which the argument would be relevant, I don't understand what you're specifically attacking here.
Something trans related maybe? Dunno. Woke movie making is super annoying but I didn't get any of that from the new Matrix. Maybe because all the characters were chosen in 1999 before CRT took off, maybe because it just wasn't necessary. As a kid Morpheus/Fishburne was perhaps the coolest black man I'd ever seen, the casting was perfect. The man managed to somehow carry off both radiating gravitas and also this almost child-like naivety and belief in Neo.
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.
> Woke movie making is super annoying but I didn't get any of that from the new Matrix.
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?
So your guess is that no movies from here on out are going to feature lesbians because of CCP, and you assumed everyone else would have made this connection and would immediately notice girls with tattoos, blue hair, and connect this with both ultra-left and chinese overlords!? And the apparent lack of these qualities compared to previous movies that might have featured slightly less subtle hints of gay sex is where you draw the line?
That's a pretty tenous connection imo. You might as well pick any arbitrary thing you think is declining, financially I guess, and point to wokeness or the CCP as the cause. Is there something specific you saw in the older movies that you think is missing because of that stuff, therefore the movie is bad and wokeness is responsible?
I claimed censorship is the cause followed by identifying the censoring parties.
I can imagine areas where censorship could lead to increased profitability. Just as I can imagine where it can lead to losses. The Film industry I put firmly in the losses category.
Due you think continued/increased censorship will be good/profitable for the film industry?
I have no opinion on the latter, there haven't been any movies except Bond that are in theaters and I'd like to see. You could have just referred to more specific instances of CCP censorship with regard to previous Marvel releases, because I don't follow it and it just comes across as fear-baiting rather than having substance. With respect to those things like Eternals not being released in China, and Hollywood probably wanting to court their audience, afaik it was not released there and I also don't think it looks very good, so I wouldn't necessarily attribute it to censorship because obviously it didn't work to get into that market. Every superhero oriented movie I've seen, or seen a trailer for, looks awful, but unfortunately they often do sell quite well in the North American market and make up disproportionately large amount of released movies over the last decade.
In summary, the movies I've seen that suck tend to just suck. Usually it's because they're way too long, or they don't tell a story very well, or the plot is just rehashed and contrived. James Bond was great, 1917 etc, but others just seem uninspired. To make a case that censorship is the reason, I think you'd need be annoyed with specific aspects of a production, rather than the entire thing.
I think there's an issue on the internet of people wanting to discuss somewhat contentious issues that are assumed to be followed by everyone, like CCP stuff or immigration or trans issues or whatever, but most people just don't care or aren't in that bubble, so it tend to come across as a bit sus unless you can tie it in together and make a reasonable case for it.
I was so disappointed in this movie and I thought the trailer looked amazing. It was just so bad. When they brought back the Merovingian looking like he had not brushed his teeth is 45 years I almost turned it off. Then amazingly it got worse.
the trailer is exactly the same style of the film you get. Scenes included in it like stopping the bullets and dojo explosion look incredibly lame. Then the colors are all over the place. It's fine if you don't do the green tint, that doesn't mean you have to pop everything to 11.
Yeah at one point during one of tiresome chase scenes that was packed with gun play and slow-motion action, I recall one of the actors said “I hate bullets!”
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.
Yea…I mean, I got through it because I loved the originals but it was very much a fan-service movie.
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.
This is my take. And when thinking about it, it's rather brilliant if so. It's still painful to watch, and a bad film in every sense, but the way this was financed and got greenlit seems somehow to be a masterful rug pull. It has metal robot pokemons, freeing Neo is completely unnecessary, the new human settlement doesn't need a thing and won't fight, the soap opera low-fi slow mo fight scenes, everything seems to point to a sort of purposeful sabotage.
when it was originally written, the most common estrogen pill on the market was red.
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.
Literary theorists have been debating the nature of meaning within texts for well over a century. The matter is not settled.
You advocate a highly intentionalist interpretation of a work - the author says it means this, so that's what it means.
'jevoten and others in this thread advocate a more formalist interpretation - the meaning lies in what is written.
I drew your attention to a more reader-focused perspective - that meaning comes from the reader's experience of the work, not the work or the author.
To say "they would know" is to sidestep this entire discussion and suggest that there's some objectively correct way of interpreting a text and that correct way is intentionalism. This is reductive because it ignores the reality that many people (theorists and non-theorists) don't put a whole lot of stock in authorial intent.
maybe that's what you think you meant. but my experience of this thread is that you explained your original comment about how i should disregard explanations
You asked how the red pill was like estrogen pills. I don't think the Wachowskis said that part was intended though.
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.
Are there some sources from the era that the movie was released that make that connection? Or is this just people trying to take back the meaning of the red pill from those scary republicans?
I don't understand how they do the math with streaming.
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.
Streaming services truly flip the "economic calculation problem" [0] on its head: the stakeholders would supposedly gain more reliable information on the value of different IP licenses if we all made purchases a la carte. As it is, they have little idea which program I'm hate-watching ironically, vs what's good enough to convince me to stay on the service (Midnight Mass), vs what I'd pay for exorbitantly out of pocket if I could (OA season 3).
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.)
To add to the complicated accounting, I have AT&T as my ISP ($70/mo for 1Gbps symmetric service) and one day last year or two they just started throwing in access to HBO Max.
I think the key point is that streaming companies don't think of it as "our customers are paying us a subscription fee and then our catalog is free to them", but rather as "our customers are paying us a percentage of their subscription fee for each thing they watch".
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.
It doesn't matter how they gauge the success internally.
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.
Hi. I think you may have got the wrong end of the stick, here.
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.
Netflix was an example of streaming , i didn't mean to say Netflix specifically, my arguments before were for an example of external streaming ( I assumed that even if owned by the same parent they don't share numbers between studio and platform , which may not be true.)
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 agree it's interesting. It seems like they lose money when an HBO subscriber would have bought a ticket but streams it instead. On the other hand they make a lot of money if someone signs up for HBO to see the Matrix, and ends up continuing their subscription for months/years.
I think the saying "set and setting" applies to movies as much as it does to psychedelics. I was hyped to watch it, I was nicely toasted, I watched it as soon as it came out, and it did everything right in my book. For starters, it grabbed me from the get-go: the shot of a SWAT operator's foot stepping into a puddle was totally gorgeous. Everything else that happened was interesting as hell - a program being evolved in a simulated environment, an agent realizing he's Morpheus, Jessica Henwick being totally gorgeous and speaking in a soft honey voice. If the first moments of a film charm you, you are much more predisposed to like it.
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.
I’m absolutely with you here. I walked into it having intentionally avoided the trailers, and treating the whole existence as a thrown-bone, a “here’s one last throwback to something truly special, in a time when we could all use some familiarity,” while remaining self-aware, and tongue-in-cheek. It knew what it was, looked that right in the face, and said ‘don’t take it too seriously.’ And I didn’t, and it was great.
I'll just throw out but I felt I was actually watching 3 different movies stacked one on top of another the first was some sort of meta-comedy about bad sequels and reboots then it went into some sort of shaky cam action film then it turned into some sort of zombie film.
Having watched it I still don't think I could really explain it to someone else.
All those three movies were my teenage-hood, with which I had no-one to share. Watched them with some friends, whose reactions were all "meh". Philistines!
I feel like they did pretty good with this one though, it is THE MATRIX after all and nothing can ever live up to the first watch of the first movie. I actually laughed several times and that was new.
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)
Hot take: I was a huge fan of the original matrix trilogy and the animatrix, and while it wasn't what I expected, I enjoyed the film. In the late 90s, we had this whole thing of the corporate drone. That's sort of dead now. Instead we have millennials and zoomers with their spunk and crippling anxiety and standups and fair trade and breaking of fourth walls, and meta, etc, etc. It just feels like the original trilogy were movies that matched the late 90s and early 00s, and this movie matches the 2020s. It is impossible to take the sincere authenticity of the first three films and transplant them into the 2020s without having an identity crisis. This is just the shit timeline we're living in. Movie was on point. Was delighted to see none other than NPH as the central villain. Would have been much worse without him, imo.
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.
I should add, though, I did like the interesting tidbits on what happened with Zion, how the machines went to war with _each other_, and how a new Zion (I forget the name) was formed, but instead allying with exiled machines. I was fascinated and wanted to know more about that "blue" faction and the "red" faction of robots that are seen briefly fighting each other. That glimpse into the lore was worth it for me.
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.
Agreed, the robots fighting each other aspect was interesting, I perked up at that. In retrospect, it's a sensible prediction of how artificial consciousnesses would behave given resource constraints. It's a question that's ignored in the single-hive-mind view from so many other dystopian techno-futures.
Since the 90s the concept of the corporate drone has only increased. Swap out Neo in a cubicle for Amazon warehouse worker, and you've got "the Matrix is keeping you on a tighter leash now".
I find it very odd that people swear the themes wouldn't work today.
I'm not saying things aren't worse, I'm saying they are worse in a different way. The suit wearing corporate drone software developer in a cubicle isn't a thing anymore. Now it's a t-shirt wearing bearded fair-trade coffee lover attending daily standups, writing articles on medium, and inventing yet another frontend javascript framework in their free time.
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.
The problem with this new film is that it teases at this sort of social commentary at the beginning and fails to follow up on it in the rest of the film. Besides "swarm mode" (just awful unsubtle naming convention) and "new bullet time that's so uber that Neo can't defeat it!" there's not a ton different about this new version of the Matrix from the other.
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.
The thing that wouldn’t work is to try to do something sincere instead of everything dripping in ever so hilarious irony.
I honestly can’t wait for gen Z to do something different please. It’s been like 20 years since someone made art that was not ironic
Unfortunately Gen Z only deals in irony, more so than any generation. One of their central tenants is that nothing can be truly sincere. Maybe in another decade or two we'll see a generation that takes this to the next logical evolution -- "everything is sincere"
I don’t know if it’s true that Lana W was forced to do this. I saw an interview with her and she said she needed to grieve about something and that this was what she wanted to do (or something along those lines). maybe true that WB would have done it anyway, but she didn’t seem forced.
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
So at first I dismissed your comment and moved on. But then I realized... maybe this was a troll? If WB really did try to strong arm her into making another one, this feels like the perfect response. "Sure, I'll make another one..." and then proceeds to make sure they never make a 5th.
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.
I’ve heard a different version: that the Wachowskis were told the reboot would be going ahead with or without them. The movie feels like a very personal “screw you, executives”, in that it denies catharsis to some of the most popular parts of the first movie and at the same time makes some very, very clear statements that echo what Lana Wachowski has said in the past.
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 Wachowskis were told the reboot would be going ahead with or without them.
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?
I'm sure you can understand why our beloved parent company, Warner Brothers, has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy. They informed me they're gonna do it with or without us.
The cover ruined it for me. I remember being a kid and seeing that scene with Neo flying and Rage Against The Machine playing and it sent chills down my spine. Not so much this time around.
I saw it, and enjoyed it for what it was. I will say that it very much felt like a few "Matrix" projects mashed-up together. I especially feel like the new characters could have stood on their own as a miniseries much better.
It was like two movies. The first act was amazing, and the second was just a marvel clone. They should have just stuck with the meta self-referential in-matrix story for the whole movie. Furthermore, they could have taken it even further and epxlored the idea of onion layers of reality, with magical realms, multiple dimensions a la spiderverse, etc
I don’t understand how they made the marketing scene with so much self awareness and then failed to capitalize on it. It’s a really great start. They pretty successfully deconstructed it.
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.
It really was a middle ground. The first third promises deconstruction and meta-stuff, but then the rest of the movie is redoing Matrix cliches, right down to the utterly confusing final rescue sequence in the real world coupled with the awfully shot final chase sequence in the Matrix.
The real world rescue sequence really was confusing, and on top of that was comprised of a bunch of really uninteresting characters. They kept saying it was extremely difficult but it didn’t really come off that way in the film.
It reminded me of the final sequence of Reloaded, it did the "character describes plan as plan happens on-screen", but at least the mission in that movie had some tension after things went awry when the Sentinels attacked the third ship that wasn't captained by Morpheus or Niobe.
Doesn't HBO Max streaming somewhat counteract the losses in the theater? When HBO & Warner Bros decided to release all their movies on big screen and streaming at the same time for 2021 (only), part of it was a play to increase their streaming app subscription base? I know that we got a family subscription to HBO Max for exactly this as the main reason.
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.
Exactly. Box office numbers are going to become less and less important over time. Except for the few big special effect movies, most movies will move to streaming.
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.
Honestly, even as long as the movie was, I felt like they could've added another thirty minutes worth of material to make it an even three hours to flesh out the characters and add more clarity to some points made in the movie. The theatrical cut for The Fellowship of the Ring ran 178 minutes while ran a relatively paltry 156 - just twenty minutes could have pushed the movie lightyears ahead.
Not counting the benefit of it HBO Max is like saying every single Netflix produced show was a loss. It's part of the reason people have the service, so part of the money made from the service (and cable subscriptions) can be counted to it. Doing otherwise is effectively lying.
Not surprised. The Movie was an utter trash cash grab hollywood sellout "look how meta and cool I am" let's shit on the original. If you liked it I'd love to know why?
I think most people that viscerally hate it came in with strong expectations. On its own I found it quite interesting. On the matrix reddit there are two "blue pill, red pill" threads that split apart the people that like it and don't, and for the people who like it there are some long essays explaining why, that I found heartfelt and well-reasoned. I have a theory that if people really liked Cloud Atlas and Sense8, they're more apt to like Resurrections.
You nailed it. Cloud Atlas is one of my favorite movies of all time and, yet, it is like cilantro – some people love it, some people hate it. The opinions about the movie are so polar that I feel it's genetic. I also enjoyed Resurrections and think it's less cynical that others assert it is.
Do you have links to those essays? I would love to
In my opinion, the movie wasn't trying to shit on the original at all. The Matrix has, since the beginning, been a really sentimental, romantic story that wears its heart on its sleeve and really directly states its themes. Meanwhile, the series ballooned into a big franchise that ran its course, its about to get put through the reboot-industrial complex, and its themes get adulterated and co-opted all of the time. The Matrix in pop culture is more associated with style and effects than the themes.
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 agree with you. I think it tried less to shit on the original movie than make you deeply question what you believed to be true about the original movie (and trilogy). On one hand, you could believe that this was all some cheap gimmick to boot. On the other hand, you could have deep faith that love is all that matters.
I believe that it's an achievement for the film to garner this much discussion. If anything, the film predicts it.
tldr, Resurrections is to Matrix what Last Jedi was to Star Wars. You're either in or you're out on it.
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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.
It wasn’t a good movie and it wasn’t supposed to be. I personally disliked it enough to turn it off early but I imagine there’s enough contrarians around that when told by Wachowski through the 4th wall that its a forced piece of art and is going to be garbage - they’ll like it specifically for that reason.
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.
The meta aspect was a bit tedious at first, but I did enjoy how the story was set up. Neo trapped for years and years? Genius. NPH in the perfect role.
It opened early in Japan, so I watched it last month, without trailers or anything. It's best to not expect anything, then it should be perfectly enjoyable.
> For every Spider-Man: No Way Home, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, No Time to Die, Dune, or Fast & Furious 9 that brings in big bucks, there’s a Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Suicide Squad, Tenet, or Raya and the Last Dragon that fails to turn a single penny of profit in theaters.
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.
Hollywood accounting isn't evil. It just operates from a not-wallstreet perspective. Did Keanu Reeves take home a paycheck? Did the director? Were all the union techs paid? Were all the contract animation and sound studios paid? The film made everyone plenty of money. That investors got screwed doesnt really phase the people who actually make movies.
Never, ever, invest in a movie. You will have better luck with lottery tickets.
What was the story in this sequel? The original matrix was about "techno-buddhism" and even character names were carefully chosen, e.g. Sati who could cross the boundary. It wasnt about green characters on the screen and black leather suits, and people felt that, even if they werent familiar with this philosophy.
The first act seemed to revolve around this feeling that the inability to accept artificial / inauthentic nature of things has grown into a source of anxiety and personal struggle whereas the original trilogy offered it as an opportunity and advantage. I thought it was a pretty solid take.
The second and third acts were mangled by a lot of unnecessary throwbacks.
Not sure if it applies to this particular link, but WeGotThisCovered is probably the worst website ever, full of clickbait. 90% (or more) of their news are clickbait straight lies, they don't care that's a lie as long as it is clickable and people comment it on Facebook.
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.
At one point, many of my entertainment news in my Google feed came from WGTC, and 95% of the time, what they presented in the article simply doesn't match the given impression of its title (a clickbait, so to speak), or simply came from not-so-reliable source. I eventually have to tell Google I don't want to hear from this source again.
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.
Fwiw, my wife and I just watched the 2 hour Potter 20 years later thing that came out on HBO Max. She actually talks about coming in to audition. The only person they mention going to get is DR himself.
Yeah. As confusing or bad the writing and dialogue in this movie got, that was never new to the franchise, the sequels had plenty of that. But what doomed this one was the lack of good action, some of it was truly bad. I understand that Lana is much older now and likely doesn't want to do the "hire a comic book artist to storyboard each scene in excruciating detail to make it perfect" ordeal anymore, the stars are much older and not as action-capable as they used to be, and that the pandemic probably troubled the production terribly. But the action scenes look incomprehensible at times (the train), with utterly mediocre CGI (the lake house), just horrid angles and motion (the finale at night).
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.
I had hoped they'd have learned the lesson of the sequels and this would be a good movie. However after 10 minutes it was clear this was going to be bad and I let all hopes of medium expectations fade. In that sense 'it was meh', and I am sorry I risked seeing it at the theater.
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.
I thought it was pretty good. Was only really disappointed that there weren't more groundbreakingly cool action sequences along the lines of what we got in 1 and 2. It's actually refreshing that it didn't do nonstop fan service like most reboots of hugely popular franchises. I respect the choices she made a lot.
It seems that people expectations with this movie was that it will try to expand on or answers some of the questions that the last 3 movies raised, instead it turns out to be giving just a happy ending to Neo and Trinity characters.
Lots! It made $363 million off a $200 million budget [1]. That's probably lower than the studio expected for such a big movie, but still a solid profit and especially good in today's post(?)-covid box office.
That figure is an estimate of the production budget only. In order to know the estimated gross profit, we'd have to have some sense of the promotional and distribution costs. For a tentpole like Tenet, those are usually pegged at pretty near the production budget. So, call it $400 million.
In other words, its pretty unlikely the theatrical run yielded a profit.
Warner Bros does not get all of the $363 million at the box office, the theatres takes their cut. For domestic gross it's said to be roughly 50/50 during a box office run, with the distributor (in this case WB) getting the most during the first week, and then the theatres get the most, for Foreign gross it's much less, with China only giving 20% of the box office to foreign distributors.
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.
A general rule of thumb is a movie needs to make back double its budget to recoup after-filming costs, like advertising, ect to start turning a profit. A $363 million return on a $200 million flick is not a good return.
Nolan took one for the team as a "first big post-lockdown blockbuster" opener and it didn't work amazingly. Lot of theaters were still closed, lot of people stayed home.
Did OK given the circumstances but it wasn't a big financial win.
I enjoyed it too. Tenet was released in the middle of 2020 though. I remember when I went to the theater to watch it I felt like I was doing something morally wrong.
I mostly liked it but I still think they did Starro dirty. Seriously, Starro typically takes on the entirety of the justice league by itself.
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.
It was my first time meeting Starro, and I was pleasantly surprised at how they managed to make a giant space starfish still seem like a feasible villain. If you'd told me that they fight a giant starfish that mind controls people with smaller starfish, I would've been bemused.
Starro is supposed to be closer to a Thanos-like figure. Yes, a giant starfish, but cunning and hyperintelligent. It's Starro the Conqueror because he has already conquered other galaxies and is coming for earth.
Space army, hyperspace travel / technology, in depth knowledge of the mysteries of the universe.
But yeah, a giant starfish
Looks can be decieving.
All the talk about sequels and creativity or lack thereof upthread made me remember- has anyone watched the WB movie Reminiscence that came out last year, also on HBO Max?
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.
Given Hollywood accounting I don't trust this one bit, and I haven't even seen this film - I might not for a few years, but it just sounds like nonsense.
The Matrix is a 'trans metaphor', Lilly Wachowski says. "That was the original intention but the world wasn't quite ready," says Lilly Wachowski, who came out as trans along with her sister Lana after the films came out.
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.
Nothing wrong with taking away what you want from art, but uh.. you're exactly describing the 'blue pill' (the comforts of escapism), so there is some irony in that with regard to the Matrix in particular.
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).
It ebbs and flows with what is happening. Escapist fantasies are popular when times are hard. I feel times are hard now. Philidelphia and Leaving Las Vegas are two of my favorite movies, but I saw them when times were pretty good. However, I would enjoy an interesting movie about social issues being debated these days, just not with a Matrix backdrop and theme.
I think this is on you. Take a break from the news and from the chatter. I too read Lily's trans explanation for the Matrix. Unlike you, I wasn't triggered by the film. I didn't even think about it too much and, when I did think about it, it wasn't anything negative.
Getting triggered would be how some reacted to The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorsese. I was the opposite. I was untriggered by this Matrix. I'm uninterested because I predicted (correctly it seems) that this Matrix was going to be a dull and uninteresting film.
That quote is talking about the first movie. The original one. Neo’s story is a cleverly hidden but also extremely thin metaphor about a trans woman finding herself. That scene with the red and blue pills is literally Neo choosing estrogen over antidepressants. “Mr. Anderson” with that iconic over the top emphasis on the mister is Neo getting deadnamed. Neo has this feeling that the world is wrong (gender dysphoria) and finds the truth in online chat rooms and in a bar full of people who wear full leather outfits (a crude stand-in for the LGBT community).
I could keep doing this for every part of the movie but you get the picture. And it’s all canon.
I know but this article is from 7 August 2020 so I got the impression, given the climate of the day, for this Matrix to be even more about it.
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.
This movie is basically a conmemorative sequel with pets and zombies. It feels like a wink to Disney.
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.
By what I've heard about it in various chat boards and RLM, this movie seems very interesting to me. Much more so than a "Matrix 1 remake" could have been. I tried to watch it in cinema, but unfortunately all the good theaters were fully booked.
It's trash movie deserving to lose money, I wish I could get returned time wasted on this crap. I mean 2nd and 3rd movie were bad, but this is whole lotta other level.
I think the IMDb rating 5.7/10 speaks volumes why it's crashing.
I couldn't have imagined that the fourth would be the worst, though. Not only silly and pointless (I don't care if Neo and Trinity are together, I care about the nature of reality and the fate of humanity), but without Yuen Woo Ping, even the action was trash. I can't stand the parade of superhero movies, but I'd be hard put to think of one I wouldn't have preferred to this. I fell asleep an hour in, tried it again the next day and bailed with 15mins left.
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.
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.
To add to that, _Speed Racer_ should be the thing that TV manufacturers pack in to show off their fancy 4K HDR TVs — bright and vibrant in a way that Hollywood action movies avoid nowadays. The dialogue and acting are corny and stilted, but in a way that mirrors the TV show its adapting.
Jupiter Ascending is a guilty pleasure. I know it's bad, so when I'm in the mood to shut my brain off and it's available, I do watch it from time to time. It's got enough visuals and entertainment in it that it'll keep my attention for a bit. Plus, Mila.
TBH, I found a way to enjoy Jupiter Ascending by imagining that the Big Rich Family was a precursor to Dune. It's not perfect of course, but the worldbuilding part of that was fun to imagine as something pre-Butlarian-Jihad.
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.
In comparison, Spiderman No Way Home is the 8th highest grossing film of all time. I haven't seen it yet, but some of my friends have said the two films are equally bad. It seems they both attempt to sell nostalgia, and one of them worked and one didn't
I enjoyed Resurrections. It was the kind of lighter Matrix I was craving. IMHO No Way Home was boring and tried to do too much. I didn't enjoy the Maguire or Garfield Spiderman movies, so them being in it and old villains reappearing didn't do much for me. Willam DaFoe is always a welcome addition to any movie, however. There were some bright spots that I hope they build upon, and I'm looking forward to more in the Dr Strange universe. Aside from that, it was underwhelming, in direct contrast to Far From Home.
No Way Home seemed like it was doing the "let's reexamine the legacy of a long-established superhero IP" thing that Into the Spider-Verse already did three years ago.
Spider-Man I thought was a well done blockbuster. First half drags a little but the climax and second half are pretty solid with an emotional scene and great chemistry
I guess that heavy marketing and hyping nostalgia to fans and reheating an old film's ingredients somehow still works with die-hard super-fans. However, the result of this and reviews from the fans generally always ends in disappointment as their expectations are never met.
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.
You ever have that one friend who's taste in movies is so bad that you know any recommendation from them is likely horrible and they also don't seem to like popular movies? You seem to have multiple of those.
I actually quite liked the expansion on the lore and mythology of the movie. Also the new blue-haired actress lit up every scene she was in. More of her please!
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting