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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.
Whoa.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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?
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.
That's because all of this has happened before and it will all happen again.
Wait .. Wait, was that the wrong franchise?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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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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.
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.
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!"
> (I challenge anyone here to name a remake^H^H^H^H^H^H regurgitation that was better than the original.)
FTFY.
/sarcasm You mean the new Ghostbusters -- that NO one asked for -- was better then the original? **snicker**
Oh wait, I _actually_ have a legitimate remake that isn't shit. Challenge accepted!
Robin Hood.
I mean, one of the eleven remakes has to be better then the original 1912 version, right? :-)
But yeah, I agree with you 99%. I'm tired of film re-cash-grabs
Instead of reboots / reimaging / remakes / reimagining -- we should call them for what they are:
Regurgitation
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.
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.
If the matrix was layered, obviously the second layer was for the machines, and was there because the humans won in the host "reality", and even those thinking themselves humans in the second matrix would actually be AI slaves for humanity in the 3rd layer :P