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'The Matrix' Reboot: It's Finally Happened. Hollywood Has Run Out of All the Ideas (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Quartz report: In our hearts, we all knew this day would come. Warner Bros. is planning a reboot of The Matrix just 18 years after the iconic sci-fi action film dazzled audiences around the world, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The Matrix films were lauded for their creativity, special effects, and distinct cyberpunk and manga influences. In total, the trilogy grossed over $1.6 billion worldwide. The Matrix will join other famous film properties -- Star Wars, Godzilla, Planet of the Apes, and Terminator among them -- receiving a recent franchise reboot or "reimagining." Others include RoboCop, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, and Jurassic Park. Meanwhile, reboots of Indiana Jones, Predator, Jumanji, and every superhero movie that's ever existed, are scheduled to hit theaters soon. And TV, for its part, is a dystopian wasteland of bland prequels to famous action movies. Hollywood relying on tentpole franchises, instead of taking risks on original ideas, is not new or surprising. But many believed that certain properties like The Matrix were off limits -- at least so soon after originally being made. It's clear now, though, that the major film studios can't afford to wait. They have no other ideas. This puts the studios in a precarious situation, because the once tried-and-true strategy of inundating cinemas with popular franchise extensions no longer looks as foolproof as it used to.
remake 2 & 3. They were garbage.
I think the submitter meant Star Trek not Star Wars. Star Trek got the re-imagining, Star Wars has merely had more delivered of the pre-envisaged canon.
I wonder how long we'll have to wait before a proper new and original franchise star up. I'd like to see Elric or the Ian M. Banks Culture stories
It's good luck to be superstitious
Ideas are plentiful. I can come up with ideas. Some might even be decent movies.
But ideas are risky. Making a movie is expensive, especially a big-title blockbuster. Tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars for the very biggest. $63,000,000 for the Matrix. Of course studios aren't going to gamble that kind of money on new, unproven ideas. They will spend it on things that they know have a proven history of financial success. Franchises, sequals, spin-offs. Things the market has assessed, and judged worthy. Stars with a track record of drawing in the crowds. Stories that are packed with cliches, but cliches that audiences have always responded positively to.
This assures hollywood of profits, but it also means all movies start to look the same after a while. If you want new material you will have to look to independent productions, where they can take risks - but be warned, Sturgeon's law holds, and you will have to wade through a lot of horrible B-movies and obscure review websites to find the hidden gems.
The Hollywood business is currently driven by metrics that put incredible emphasis on the immediate payout over the long-term health of franchises and eventual returns that used to come with home video sales. Part of this has been driven by the digitization of movies and music and part of it is the marketing of instant gratification.
Much of this has to do with Wall Street's insistence for quarterly returns since this is where movie studios have to go to if they want the cash to make them. It's also why you've seen movie budgets both explode and shrink at the same time. The banks want their money at a return rate which would make most mobsters blush. If you're not going to produce a hit that will, at minimum, return triple its costs then you'll not get financed. On the other hand if you can keep the costs down in the single digit millions, then plain curiosity during opening weekend will likely see profit.
The stuff in the middle doesn't return fast enough for anyone to care about getting it made. Forty million for a movie these days? Forget it. Hollywood can't make the guarantees it can with a budget of two-hundred million. You want the movie to grow an audience through word of mouth? Forget it. Hollywood doesn't have the patience for that to happen. It needs the numbers to come up in the black inside of the next twelve weeks, not in the next two years.
There's hundreds of movies that come out each year, maybe 10% of which are prequels or re-makes. If I go to AV Club and look up their reviews of recent movies, I see:
After The Storm, Taipei Story, Frantz, The Sense Of An Ending, Raw, Personal Shopper, My Scientology Movie, Actor Martinez, Kong: Skull Island, The Last Word, The Shack, Table 19, Catfight, Before I Fall, Wolves, Donald Cried, Logan, I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore, Collide, Rock Dog, Ash Brannon
20 movies, only two of which are big re-makes/sequels of well-known action movies. So what's the problem? If you don't like franchise movies, the large majority of movies being created aren't re-makes/sequels.
It's like saying all music today is terrible because you hate country...just listen to something else!
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Fuck me.
I'm old.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
They'll screw it up as they did with Point Break
I think the problem is that there isn't an asshole shortage in Hollywood.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Can we stop with this reinventing of the language and stick with the words that really describe what they're doing? They're doing remakes. The only reboot I've seen is Star Trek, where they used time travel to radically change the universe, but it's technically the same universe (or multiverse) as everything that had preceded it. The new Battlestar Galactica pushed the term "reImagining" to stress that they were changing the story and doing it differently, but it was still a remake (a fantastic one).
Movies in a franchise are generally either a remake or a sequel (or prequel). I'm not sure I would use the term "sequel" for the James Bond movies, where each one tends to be an independent storyline with few sequential aspects, but loosely speaking they fit the definition.
yes, please... or Snowcrash
I vote for Cryptonomicon.
That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of creativity's death.
The studios primarily care about profits reaped with minimal risk. The glut of prequels, sequels, reboots, and adaptations is happening because those properties are already known among the population and have a built-in audience.
Consequently, original material gets shoved aside. Hollywood writers should be pissed because they're not being utilized to their fullest extent. At this rate, Avatar may be the last original property to originate in Hollywood.
Remakes are usually dimwitted rewrites of old classics, (I challenge anyone here to name a remake that was better than the original.)
That's easy, there's a bunch.
1. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). The first one in the 50s was interesting and not bad, but Donald Sutherland's version was excellent. Don't watch the 3rd one made around 1990 though. The 2000s one with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig isn't bad.
2. The Thing (1982) by John Carpenter. This was a remake of a cheesy 50s movie. JC's version is fantastic, and has amazing stop-motion effects.
3. Battlestar Galactica (2003). The 70s show it was a "re-imagining" of was rather cheesy, like most TV and sci-fi stuff in the 70s. The 2003 mini-series was fantastic, and the follow-up TV show was great too, for about 2 seasons. Unfortunately, it jumped the shark after that, somewhere around season 3.
4. The Fly (1986). Jeff Goldblum's version is much better than the 50s version.
Here's an article that lists some more.
Translation: "I only go see big budget blockbusters and I don't understand why Hollywood would rather bet that money on a proven franchise or remake rather than a riskier original film. Plus I'd rather whine about it than risk going to see smaller, independent films that might be original!"
Star Wars: ESB is the first thing that comes to mind there.
Some people might argue "Aliens", but I would argue against that, instead maintaining that both movies were excellent, for different reasons and shouldn't be compared too directly.
Some people might argue Terminator 2.
Superman 2 is a possibility.
Maybe X-men 2.
I can't think of any others offhand. Notice that most of these are well before 2000, just like all the ones in my movie re-make list (except BSG, but that wasn't a movie remake, it's TV) Personally, I think it's safe to say that in the last 15 years, there have been NO remakes or sequels better than the original, and really that Hollywood is going down the tubes.
From Wikipedia
The movie started life as a script called Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine.[2] When similarities, especially the "bugs," were pointed out between this and the novel Starship Troopers, plans were made to license the rights to the book and tweak character names and circumstances to match.
It's the beginning of the end for Hollywood, IMO. Their model can only support smash blockbusters, and now they're out of them.
But the blockbusters are still making a billion dollars each. Transformers makes money. The new Star Wars are forgettable crap but they make money.
Saying it's the "beginning of the end" when they're still pulling in billions is like Yoga Bera's restaurant nobody goes to anymore because it's too crowded.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.