Village Roadshow Entertainment has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2025-03-17/joker-matrix-studio-village-roadshow-files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy

by MilnerRoute • 1 year ago

76 70 1 year ago

latimes.com

treetalker• 1 year ago

How is this possible when The Matrix: Resurrections was the best entry in the whole series? /s

Does anyone know: Did the dispute with Warner Brothers cause the digs against Warner Brothers in the Resurrections script, or vice versa, or were they both caused by something else, or were they unrelated?

Andrex• 1 year ago

Unrelated.

- The dispute was after the movie released.

- Only one of the Wachowskis could be convinced to come back.

- WB had tried and failed at least once getting a new Matrix movie off the ground after Revolutions without the Wachowskis.

- The Matrix Resurrections features the line "[Warner Bros. are] going to do it with or without us."

More background: https://ew.com/movies/matrix-resurrections-scene-doing-seque...

DecentShoes• 1 year ago

They deserve that for Matrix Resurrections.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

And Joker 2 or whatever stupid-ass name they gave it.

prisenco• 1 year ago

Folie à Deux was a great name though. Not defending the movie but as a title for a Joker & Harley movie it works.

zeroday28• 1 year ago

Hey! I enjoyed Matrix Resurrections.

jack_pp• 1 year ago

We demand proof of mental health

gigatexal• 1 year ago

Same here

echelon5• 1 year ago

Matrix Resurrections had a super trippy premise, which was in line with the original film. The first half of the movie was momentously expectation-breaking mind fuckery, and I immensely enjoyed it. (I wish I had shut the film off after the reveal.)

The action sequences and set pieces were absolutely lackluster and downright boring despite the film's budget. (Not sure if this is due to the age of the actors - the John Wick series seems to have figured this out just fine.)

Most damning of all, the story arc, character arcs, and final resolution were phoned in and utterly forgettable. It's tragic, given the ludicrously audacious start of the film. The setup was there, but there was no investment beyond the trick premise.

Lana swung for the fences but struck out. It felt like an M. Night Shyamalan letdown.

Ghos3t• 1 year ago

You do know that Lana Wachowski intentionally made it as bad as possible to tank the franchise cause she was forced to make the movie or the studio would get someone else to direct it right?

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

Woah, a matrix movie came out… wait, four years ago?

cadamsdotcom• 1 year ago

Better to keep living like they only made 3 Matrix films :)

echelon5• 1 year ago

Watch the first half of it, then turn it off.

If you like late 90's / early 2000's M. Night Shyamalan, the first half of the film is brilliant. But after the reveal it falls apart like the last season of Game of Thrones. It's as if Lana stopped caring.

It would have been fantastic to have timed it with the release of the Matrix MMO game. It's as if that had been the plan all along.

echelon5• 1 year ago

Another sign tech has absorbed Hollywood. It's become so anemic that it's falling to shambles. Big tech will buy it up on the cheap.

bravoetch2• 1 year ago

They mention about $50m coming in annually, I assume that's from film and tv rights. What does big tech have to do with that?

echelon5• 1 year ago

The mid market film has died thanks to Disney monopolizing the box office with their tent poles. (Though this is questionable hypothesis and more of a complaint about Marvelization.)

The healthy revenue from long box office legs and DVD sales has died thanks to streaming. And the youth that would rather get their dopamine fix elsewhere.

But the streaming wars have done incredible damage to this once thriving industry.

Amazon and Apple have come in and subsided their own studios from unrelated business units. (Where is antitrust?) They're teaching consumers that the price of movies is free.

MilnerRoute• 1 year ago

Non-paywalled link.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/joker-matrix-producer-files-b...

sien• 1 year ago

Note this is related to but separate from the Australia company Village Roadshow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Roadshow

The Australian company owned 3% of the American Village Roadshow.

daniel_iversen• 1 year ago

Wonder how it's possible.

"The breach of contract lawsuit against Warner Bros. came after the studio introduced “The Matrix Resurrections” in December 2021 on its HBO Max streaming service the same day the film was released in movie theaters. Village Roadshow complained that the Burbank studio’s pivot away from an exclusive theatrical release had destroyed the value of a key franchise."

-- how is that true? Did they lose that much box office money on Matrix Resurrections that cashflow or lack of revenues made them collapse?

“A confluence of macro-economic factors have weighed heavily on the company’s balance sheet,”

-- Now we're getting somewhere. An unbalanced budget? What might have caused it I wonder? Would they have a worse time than the other studios or have less cash reserves etc?

A shame the article doesn't give many answers. Would love to know.

fsckboy• 1 year ago

I just assume every step of this was hollywood accounting tricks to not pay a bunch of the people they contractually owe money to.

eddy murphy called it "monkey points"

https://hollywoodlexicon.com/points.html

yieldcrv• 1 year ago

Bankruptcy doesn't mean they run out of money. Its protection from creditors on the expectation that a current or perceived liability will impair them, and the protection thwarts it.

But yes 99% correlated to having no ability to repay.

Its possible they expect a countersuit to win. Or they borrowed to much to pay lawyers.

donavanm• 1 year ago

The proximate cause seems to be a $100M claim from WB against VREG regarding additional finance costs for matrix revolutions circa 2021. VREGs counter(?) suit was recently kicked back and told to go to arbitration. VREG also claims to have spent $19M pursuing their legal claims/response so far. My read is legal costs + no productions in the pipeline + no recent profitable activity + a likely ~$100M arbitration result is exactly whats led to bankruptcy.

harrall• 1 year ago

You can’t trust public statements for reasoning.

One retailer I liked blamed “shifting consumer demand for their demise but they also doubled their store count by like 100 within two years. Consumer demand did shift but they also legitimately f’d up.

bravoetch2• 1 year ago

The article mentions they pivoted to a different business model just before the pandemic. That model was to be a full in-house studio. Their timing was unfortunate.

smcin2• 1 year ago

“The Matrix Resurrections” was released Dec 22, 2021 (during Covid) with only $10.7m US opening, $37.7m US gross and $157m worldwide (cinema) gross against a reported budget of $190m. So it certainly seems like WB's switch to simultaneous streaming+cinematic release lost them a packet (although it got so-so reviews so maybe it wouldn't have done great ordinarily anyway).

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt10838180/

mmooss• 1 year ago

How much did they gross from streaming it?

system7rocks• 1 year ago

I wonder too if this is poor leadership not understanding that the streaming era is just a return to classic TV. Like hey, swinging and missing on a high cost major blockbuster is more devastating than greenlighting a ton of lower budget movies with up and coming actors.

Aka I like Chris Pratt or the Rock just fine but one movie a year is enough??

miguelrodrigue• 1 year ago

Ug5

greatgib• 1 year ago

   Village Roadshow put into development 99 feature films, 166 scripted television series and 67 unscripted series. Of those, six movies and seven television series went into production.

I don't know if it is standard practice, but these numbers looks wild to me.

cm2187• 1 year ago

I don't know the exact numbers but it is consistent with other stuff I heard (notably the Brett Easton Ellis podcast which I recommend). Script writers churn a lot of scripts, many of them get bought but never produced. Or sit as a project for 10 years or more. But I think development doesn't mean they engage massive costs, just that they start trying to get the financing, perhaps with a tentative director and/or actor name attached to the project.

WorldMaker4• 1 year ago

Yeah, there's a bunch of reasons Hollywood is notoriously known for "Development Hell" as its longest phase in the creative process. Production is generally "quick" and has a lot known knowns. Development is a lot of gossip and paperwork and contracts and writes and rewrites and license agreements and market studies and so forth, sometimes "forever" even for projects "everyone" thinks should be an easy thing to kick off and wants to see on some screen.

qingcharles• 1 year ago

This is standard. Hollywood is horrible, though. It's not usually the best stuff that bubbles to the top. And even when the good stuff does get visibility, everyone wants a piece of it (especially if they are put up some $$ or other benefit) and meddles incessantly with the production, from the script, to the casting, to the marketing.

In the music biz we used to call this "write a word, take a third." I've never asked what the Hollywood equivalent is. Every production gets enshittified.

There are mountains of supremely talented people in Hollywood, but an equal amount of totally untalented chucklefucks with money and connections to screw everything up.

Maybe the AI will put production back into the hands of the talent. Their scripts will go unmolested by talentless moneyed hacks.

bitwize• 1 year ago

It turns out, if you go all in on "torch the franchise and run" films (Matrix 4, Joker 2), you might not make back your money and can end up in a shitheap of financial trouble if they were costly to produce, distribute, and market.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TorchTheFranchis...

Yeul• 1 year ago

Did anyone even want a new Matrix movie? The story was concluded.

WorldMaker4• 1 year ago

The storyline (immediately) continued and deepened in The Matrix Online and some of us did hope for a revival of The Matrix Online, given most people missed playing through that story, with a better budget and a goal to finish its planned storyline.

Matrix 4 was interesting in that it seemed to leave The Matrix Online canon (the Wachowskis seem earnest in trusting there cross-media plays in the franchise to be/remain canon) but didn't answer some of the old questions. On the other hand it did deliver a few nice things.

But yes a Warner Brothers execute hoping to boot up a Matrix branded money printer would not have had the sense to talk to anyone previously involved in The Matrix Online, despite owning Monolith (RIP), Matrix 4 was never really about continuing the story to the people demanding "we need a Matrix 4 by such and such quarter".

maxsilver• 1 year ago

Not really (except hardcore fans, who already followed the 'after-trilogy' lore, and would have been happy with a continuation in a much cheaper format)

But Warner Brothers itself wanted a big tentpole release, and insisted Matrix be it. (Even though it wouldn't really fit that mold)

The Matrix 4 itself, even mentions how the demands on the release were ridiculous and wouldn't work (it's not 1999 anymore, you can't just re-do 1999 and expect it to work).

The Matrix 4 film itself is really good (IMHO), as a huge fan of the original stories and lore, it moves the universe forward in a way that feels authentic to the original trilogy, it reunites old characters, makes charming and thoughtful new ones, and it remains authentic and true to the original romance underpinning the whole thing. The lack of Hugo Weaving/Laurence Fishburne, and a little bit of dated action fights is the only real bummer I can think of.

The problem is that the film is only good, and not mind-crushingly great. And what everyone seemed to want out of this, was a guaranteed 300+ mil smash hit at box.

If they had released it to theaters, I don't think it would have made that. But it 'only' cost $190 million to make (Matrix 2 was 265m in 2024 dollars), and I think Matrix 4 would have done at least $200 mil total at box, if it had a theatrical release (for comparison, The Marvels is another 'good-but-not-great' SciFi action film, and grossed $206 million at box).

neonate• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/Ptomj

ggm• 1 year ago

"Hollywood accounting" being notorious for avoiding payout to rights owners down the list, is it fair to ask if this is a bit "leopards ate my face" as one arc of Hollywood consumes another by creative accounting?

The decision to release product against Village Roadshows wishes feels like potential breach of contract stuff but this is now water under the bridge.

I wonder if the bond completion insurance side of this is also now a bit underwater: money in films is strange and all kinds of people and their two-and-a-half employee company could be affected. Feel a bit sad for industry people who lose their shirt in this.

shrikant• 1 year ago

People in India might know them as the "VR" in the PVR chain of cinemas in some cities across India.

Village Roadshow Entertainment has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection

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