Huh, that's a good case for Fury Road. It's so weird though — "The Road Warrior" was an actual smash hit back in the 80s! But yeah: most of Fury Road's audience had probably never seen it.

Also: he lived.

Neil Gaiman confirmed that they had offered the part to a non-white, male actor before Smith was finally cast, but as far as I know nobody has ever confirmed that it was actually Ejiofor.

And don't forget: the stated goal of Morpheus' crew is to make life infinitely worse for every human being on the planet. That moment in the first film, when Neo wakes up from a comfortable first-world existence to find that he's actually a pod person with advanced muscle atrophy, is promptly flushed into a literal…

Seeing The Matrix, unspoiled, in a movie theater while on LSD?

Yeah, that turned out to be some dire foreshadowing of all of their worst instincts as filmmakers. "Make a vague gesture in the direction of an interesting story element, assume that the fanfic writers will flesh it out" had basically become their entire MO by the time Jupiter Ascending happened.

Derp.

Seriously. The production values and acting weren't always up to the ambition, but holy shit the ambition: they seemed to be trying to adapt every last one of the best short SF stories written over the prior two decades.

Claiming that the Wachowskis stole "The Matrix" from you is a bit of a cottage industry. Grant Morrison, as mentioned above, has been doing it for years. There's a crazy lady in LA who pops up in the news every few years claiming that she's just won a huge lawsuit against the Wachowskis for stealing it from her…

Perpetually irritated, gets run over / anvils dropped on him multiple times, can't be killed, has a bit of a speech impediment…

Yeah, "successful, well-known director of multiple high-earning pictures gets to direct a passion project" doesn't quite fit in the same mold, much as I liked Inception.

I liked District 9, but it'd be a bit of a stretch to call it a blockbuster: $210M worldwide gross receipts on a $30M budget is a really good job but it's about a third of The Matrix's earnings.

Morrison's favorite topic being how awesome Grant Morrison is, I tend to take it all with a few small grains of salt.

Was The Matrix the last come-from-nowhere blockbuster? As much as I generally enjoy This Summer's Disney/Marvel Product™ and so forth, these days any major studio hit is telegraphed and choreographed months to years in advance.

I thought he was…fine? as Elrond. Given that Peter Jackson all but hung a sign over his head saying "try to pretend I succeeded in casting David Bowie" it was a pretty thankless task.

"[tantilizing idea] from Reloaded then went [fucking nowhere] in Revolutions" is basically the entire story of the sequels. I really wish that someone had introduced the idea of a "second draft" to the Wachowskis at some point in their career.

One thing that doesn't get called out enough about The Matrix: Hugo Weaving. Dude was 39 years old when that movie was filmed, had never done anything even remotely like action cinema before (and in fact seemed to be on a comfortable British character actor trajectory), and gave one of the all-time great action…

I hear InfoWars has a pretty lax HR department and is hiring…

God, bite your tongue.

This is approximately the least surprising news ever.