Slashdot Mirror
'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.
Whoa.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They'll screw it up as they did with Point Break
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
NOW you perceive the film industry has run out of ideas? In 2017? More likely, those who voted this to the front page just happen to be in the 35 to 40 year old zone where the banality of popular entertainment starts to become intuitively obvious even to those with no critical thinking skills. Not news. Status quo.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
As I understand it, it isn't a reboot per se. Rather, it will be another story set in "The Matrix Universe." So rather than the story of the Nebuchadnezzar, it will center on the crew of, say, the Ganesha. Make it a prequel.
Think something like "Star Wars: Rogue One" or something similar.
Maybe go with the original this time? Get William Gibson to adapt it for them?
John Wick 3: The Matrix
On the run from fellow assassins, John decides to change his identity, and become Neo. Neo then encounters a group of terrorists, and is offered a chance to see the truth. The world, as it really is. After some stuff Neo/John returns and fights a bunch of terminators.
The End.
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.
Films? There is only one Matrix film. There were never any sequels.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Hollywood can't help but do this now. It's all that's left to them.
Every film nowadays has a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly thanks to Hollywood accounting practices. To invest that kind of money you have to be able to show the principals an expected return on that investment. You need to do market analysis and show that you have an audience large enough to get that return.
The only way to do that is to copy older blockbusters and assume the returns will be in the ballpark. Hence, reboots.
Look at Deadpool if you want to know about risk aversion. The studio did NOT want to make that movie. It was "risky". Imagine living in a world where you would think that a Deadpool movie was too risky. That's why they're going for The Matrix. The two sequels were garbage but still made bank. So they know that this reboot will too.
It's the beginning of the end for Hollywood, IMO. Their model can only support smash blockbusters, and now they're out of them.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Fuck me.
I'm old.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It probably won't work (at least for people who saw the original) because it won't be the original. It won't have the novelty value of those cool action scenes, of bullet time, etc. It won't have Reeves, Fishburne, Moss, or Weaving. Chances are they've learned the wrong lessons (as already shown by the 2nd and 3rd movies) and instead of a good story we'll get endless boring overly-choreographed action scenes.
On the other hand, it's a chance to do it right - ditch the battery crap and make the humans enslaved so their unused brain capacity acts as processors for the machine network, making it more creative than any silicon-based system yet designed. Make Zion just another layer to capture those who 'escaped' the Matrix. Do more with the Architect (in fact, I'd have bits of the original trilogy on his wall displays...)
Then show the REAL real world at the end of it; the new Neo waking up into a more typical futuristic world, all shiny, bright sky... but all the 'people' walking around are machines. Make the machines afraid of humans waking up en-mass because it would lobotomize them. Make the humans concerned that if they all woke up, they'd simply starve to death if the robots didn't notice and strap them right back into the Matrix.
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.
Hollywood ran out of ideas at least as far back as the 1990's. That's one of the reasons The Matrix was as popular as it was: It was, in many ways, an original thought.
I agree with others on this; leave The Matrix alone. It doesn't need to be 'rebooted', it doesn't need a 'remake'. Leave it be.
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.
I thought it would lead to layered realities, and that it would expose that many people are perfectly content in the baseline Matrix, some people's minds rebel. These people are identified and hooked to a 2nd Matrix in which they are made aware of the baseline Matrix, can interact with it, pursue their hero fantasies each to their own level necessary (Neo needed to be the One, Trinity need to be in love with the One, Morpheus had to be the one to find the One...) and steered into the whole Zion mythos.
A few might, like Neo, once exposed to he baseline Matrix, realize that they could be in a 2nd-level Matrix and find themselves able to manipulate it as well. At that point a 3rd..N+1 level matrix would be unnecessary. Those unlucky few would just be lobotomized by the machines and put back in the soup. The effort to entertain the chosen ones with Matrix 2 is justified only by the notion that the undamaged brains allow more wetware computing power to be utilized (i.e., humans not just batteries).
Neo getting a big needle in his brain may have been an unpleasant ending. Perhaps once the battle of Zion happened, the 3rd movie would end with a "reset" back to Neo first waking up in Scene 1 of the first matrix. They can just keep Groundhog Daying the hell out of Zion.
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.
after all that was a bit of a fresh idea.
Whoa.
LOL, brilliant. This is a terribly written article, for the simple reason that it fails to identify if the studios are doing a remake, a reboot, or simply adding more stories in the same 'Wachowskverse'. Remakes are usually dimwitted rewrites of old classics, (I challenge anyone here to name a remake that was better than the original.) while adding more stories occasionally yields real gems like Aliens, Empire Strikes Back, and T2. Reboots are somewhere in between where an existing IP is rewritten and started over again, such as thee fucking mess that Sony has been making of the Spider-man franchise for the better part of twenty years now. I might be willing to watch more new stories set in the same world, but I really don't need to see a new Neo movie.
Look Hollywood, if you aren't going to try to write new stories about new IP, at least write new stories about old IP rather than remake and reboot the same old stuff over and over again. We are bored with the same story over and over again.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Maybe the "AI"s were actually real people and the people were really "AI"s
Kill an enemy in a game its gone forever.
Die in a game and you always respawn.
Clearly the actual "happenings" within the movie indicate that the agents are real and the "humans" are A.I.
"His name was James Damore."
I think this was Richard Jeni. I don't remember the exact skit, but it was something like:
NOW you perceive the film industry has run out of ideas? In 2017?
Well, let's see here.
They started making a movies of video games, such as "Doom", which had very thin plots.
Then they started making movies of video games that had no discernable plot, such as "PacMan".
Then they started making movies of *board* games, such as "Battleship".
(Monopoly (the movie) is apparently in production.)
Battleship? Really?
I'm sure the studios still have a lot of ground to cover. I anxiously look forward to "solitaire, the movie" in the next year or two.
What's with this opinion about TV shows? TV has been getting better ever since networks figured out they could be successful by producing fewer episodes and focusing more on quality. Especially if you count Netflix and Amazon originals as "TV shows." And how many "prequels to famous action movies" are even out there. I only know of Sarah Connor Chronicles, Taken and the two Star Wars cartoon series. That hardly qualifies as a "wasteland". (And the Star Wars cartoons are very good, IMO.)
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!"
Can Charlie Sheen play Neo and Leslie Nielsen play Orpheus?
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.
Hollywood demands that authors of original works sign one-sided contracts that obligate them to give up their publishing and copyrights in exchange for a cut of the net profits. The problem with "net profits" is that Hollywood uses "Hollywood Accounting" tricks to turn profits into a loss and deprive authors of royalty payments. There's a REASON why established actors demand payment UP FRONT.
Some authors have sought legal relief and won, but the process is prohibitively expensive enough to discourage litigation - and Hollywood knows it. The authors may have had their day in court but they have lost control of their original material forever, as those contracts are sealed in iron-clad concrete that the control freak entertainment industry refuses to give up.
The problem isn't the lack of new ideas. The true problem is that authors have been screwed by Hollywood for so long that they refuse to sell their original works that could be made into a movie or TV show. Hollywood can't find authors willing to sell them new ideas, so they re-hash existing ones in their control into re-makes, sequels, prequels, baby versions, et al all in a formulaic process. Small wonder that there is little original material coming out of Hollywood anymore. How many more damn re-makes of "King Kong" does the world need?
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Good comment. This is also true of "I, Robot", which was based on a non-Asimov novel called "Hardwired" or similar. However, why do all movie threads on slashdot go to this topic?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.