The headline of Dan Ackman's consideration of The Matrix Reloaded in Forbes screams, "How The Matrix Ruined Movies." As far as I can tell, he hasn't seen it yet - that's backlash, after only four days:
- The Matrix Reloaded generated $93.3 million at U.S. box offices over the weekend. That's not a record total, but it's close. The Matrix phenomenon hasn't quite ruined movies--but it's close on that score, too.
....The Matrix Reloaded represents a trend where movies are opened on more and more screens, with more and more hype, where more of that hype is linked to product tie-ins, and where more releases are based on sequels, remakes or comic books. To see what's happening, it's only necessary to compare the The Matrix Reloaded to the original Matrix.
The first movie was released by Warner Bothers, a unit of AOL Time Warner (nyse: AOL - news - people ), in 1999, written and directed by the then little-known Larry and Andy Wachowski. (They had made Bound, another noir thriller--but with lesbians--three years earlier.) It wasn't exactly a sleeper, but nine other movies took in more in their opening weekends that year, including Tarzan, The Mummy, and Pokemon: The First Movie, according to Boxofficemojo.com. But the movie had staying power and proved mightily popular as well as a cult favorite. It grossed $171.5 million in the U.S., the fifth-highest that year.
The first Matrix movie itself was hailed for its inventiveness. Its plot melded cyberspace, fear of authority, state-of-the-art Hong Kong-style fight scenes and, of course, a leather-clad heroine. Roger Ebert, for instance, called it "visually dazzling cyberadventure, full of kinetic excitement." This time the special effects are, by most accounts, even more special, but the movie itself is much worse. David Edelstein, the movie critic for Slate, was a big fan of the original. But he calls Reloaded "as messy and flat-footed as its predecessor is nimble and shapely. It's an ugly, bloated, repetitive movie that builds to a punch line that should have come an hour earlier (at least)."
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