Matrix 1905, Starring: Chaplin [English Russia — Thanks, Peter K.!]

Here's a list of all the movies with production budgets of $170 million and over, for the past ten years. (We chose the threshold of $170 million because there were a ton of movies clustered around the $150 million-$160 million mark.) Movies that failed to make back their budget at the U.S. box office are underlined.

2009:

Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince: $250 million

Avatar: $237 million (according to AP)

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen: $225 million (according to NY Post)

Terminator Salvation: $200 million

G.I. Joe: The Rise Of COBRA: $175 million

Up: $175 million

2008:

Quantum Of Solace: $230.6 million

Prince Caspian: $225.6 million

Iron Man: 186.5 million

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull: $185.5 million

The Dark Knight: $185.5 million

Wall-E: $180.5 million

2007:

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End: $317.4 million

Spider-Man 3: $272.9 million

The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials: $213.4 million

Rush Hour 3: $187.4 million

2006:

Superman Returns: $295.3 million

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: $223.1 million

X-Men: The Last Stand: $209.3 million

Poseidon: $171.3 million

2005:

King Kong: $232.5 million

Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe: $197.6 million

Sahara: $176.8 million

Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire: $150 million (2005 dollars)

2004:

Spider-Man 2: $232.2 million

Troy: $199.9 million

Van Helsing: $182.8 million

The Polar Express: $186.6 million

Alexander: $175.4 million

2003:

Terminator 3: $238.4 million

The Matrix: Reloaded: $176.7 million

Master And Commander: $175.6 million

The Matrix: Revolutions: $175.6 million

2000:

The Perfect Storm: $175.6 million

1999:

Wild Wild West: $221 million

The World Is Not Enough: $173.3 million

The 13th Warrior: $206.8 million

Notes: All figures are in 2009 dollars, adjusted for inflation. These figures are just production budgets, and are based on the most accurate figures we could find. They don't include marketing budgets. And of course, many of the films which failed to break even at the U.S. box office did make a profit when you factor in international box office.

Conclusions:

There hasn't been a movie as expensive as Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End since 2007, so you could argue that, over all, movies are not getting more expensive. However, after a few years where there were four mega-budgeted movies per year, the last two years have each seen six movies with budgets over $170 million (in inflation-adjusted dollars.) And as we mentioned above, this year had the most movies costing $200 million or more of any year, with next year likely to see even more films over $200 million.

And the listing above doesn't reflect this fact, but we also found a steep rise in the number of movies costing around $150 million every year — this seems to be the safe point for a film that is expected to do well, but may not be a blockbuster. Films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Batman Begins, Star Trek and many others all have production budgets in the magic $150 million zone.

At the same time, Hollywood seems slightly better at picking winners lately. We haven't had a year where most of the hugely expensive movies failed to make back their budget at the U.S. box office since 2004, when two historical epics, The Polar Expressand Van Helsing all bombed. Or 2003, when one of two Matrix sequels underperformed, along with Terminator 3 and Master And Commander.

One thing jumps out at me: There were apparently no budget busting movies in 2000, 2001 or 2002. Apparently the first X-Men movie, which came out in 2000, had a budget of only about $75 million. And the Star Wars prequels, hideous though they were, were apparently on the cheap side, costing around $120 million each (in non-adjusted dollars.)

Why would this be? Well, look at the three big-budget movies from 1999. Notice anything the three of them have in common? Hmmm... Other mega-expensive bombs in the late 1990s include Speed 2: Cruise Control, Lethal Weapon 4 and, of course, Waterworld. The only mega-budget movies to make money in the latter half of the 1990s were Armageddon and Titanic.

Sources: Know Your Money, Forbes.com, Listphobia, The Numbers, IMDB, Box Office Mojo, Wikipedia, and other sources as cited.

1.) Club Hel

Location: The Matrix's Mega City
What kind of Crowd? Usually the tie-me-and-gag-me types like to hang out in this leather clad-paradise, but it usually seems to have a regular crowd of rogue programs masquerading as werewolves, vampires and other paranormal anomalies.
Why you should give it a shot: Most people might be thrown off by the number of vinyl cows killed to make the fetish gear, but if you were smart enough to take the red pill, this is old hat.

2.) Holoband Clubs

Location: Anywhere you want, as long as your live in Battlestar Galactica's 12 colonies.
What kind of Crowd? The holoband clubs located in the virtual realm of one's mind make Club Hel look like a neighborhood bar. Teens go inside these illegal clubs to indulge in their most deviant desires, which at the very least involve kinky sex and at the very most include human sacrifice.
Why you should give it a shot: Should you meet an unfortunate demise, this is the best place to hide a virtual replica of yourself.

3.) The Snake Pit

Location: Blade Runner's Los Angeles in the year 2019.
What kind of Crowd? The world's social elite all cooped up together, smoking opium.
Why you should give it a shot: You can have fun spotting the replicants posing as bar patrons. Why stay at home, when you can witness an existential struggle over what it means to be human take place in your neighborhood bar.

4.) The Genetic Opera

Location: Repo! The Genetic Opera's Central entertainment featuring the Blind Mag.
What kind of Crowd? If you think that Los Angeles has a bad reputation for fake people, you obviously haven't been to a city where augmenting your body is as simple as going in for a haircut.
Why you should give it a shot: It's an opera, which is hardly a bar, but when you're high on the painkiller that everybody's hooked on, Zydrate, you don't really need a Rum and Coke to tickle your fancy.

The Riverfront Times reports on Kalk, a St. Louis doctor who dumped the medical files of more than 400 of his patients into a dumpster before mysteriously disappearing from his practice, opening up a new one only a few miles away months later, and was eventually arrested for forging checks belonging to a former business partner. Along the way, the advertisements for his practice got a little... weird. In addition to calling himself "The Chosen One" in the above Star Wars ad, he also co-opted The Matrix:
Looking back at the ads now, Kalk - currently undergoing treatment for what the Riverfront Times calls "an undisclosed mental ailment" - feels that the ads are where it all started going wrong:

You could probably say [my illness started] about the time I started running the ads in the RFT... That was clearly abnormal.

What's more surprising is that more people weren't concerned when their doctor ran ads saying that, if they stayed with him forever, he would offer them the truth.

The Bizarre Ads of Dr. Alexander Kalk [Riverfront Times]

(Thanks, Jeff!)

The Newcomers (Alien Nation): District 9's aliens are most often compared to the Tenctonese, better known as the Newcomers. Like the D9 aliens, the Newcomers just can't catch a break. After fleeing from slavery on their own planet, a quarter of a million Newcomers land in Los Angeles to find a sometimes less than welcoming human population. Aside from the unfortunate names some INS officials assign the new arrivals (in the original movie, Matt Sykes' partner was named "Sam Francisco"), there are anti-alien Purists who think the Tenctonese should have stayed on Tencton, and plenty of murder, both from humans looking to eradicated the Newcomers and from those who would harvest their life-extending glands.

The Citizens of the Dominion (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine): With all of its explorations of race and morality, the Star Trek universe has had its fair share of oppressed species: the Troglyte miners who served their fellow Ardanans, the Romulans' Reman slaves, the Orion women (who only appear to be slaves), the Tosk who serve as prey for the Hunters' sport, the Bajorans who endure 50 years of Cardassian occupation, and, of course, anyone who encounters the Borg. But the Founders of the Dominion have a special talent for oppression, from engineering the supersoldier Jem'Hadar with an innate addiction to the drug ketracel white to infecting the Trevean with a congenital blight. Even the Vorta, who serve as the Dominion's middle managers, are mere slaves to the Founders, and are compelled to commit suicide if it serves their masters' purposes.

Clone Troopers (Star Wars): Slavery runs rampant in the Galactic Empire, with the Empire itself enslaving species like the Wookiees and the Mon Calamari wholesale, and some races, like the Twi'leks, would sell their own children into slavery in hopes of offering them a better life. And biological species buy and sell sentient droids (and ban them from their bars) without a second thought. But the genetically engineered (though otherwise human) Clone Troopers hold a special place among Star Wars' oppressed beings. Not only are they specifically grown for compulsory military service, they are essentially the property of the Galactic Republic, a government that has supposedly outlawed slavery.

The Ood (Doctor Who): Humans looking to have their own sentient slave without the guilt were told they could pick up an Ood servant with minimal damage to the conscience. After all, the Ood live to serve, right? Nothing in the Doctor's universe is ever so easy, and Donna and the Doctor soon discover that Ood Operations, the company supplying the alien servants, had cut off the Ood's telepathic link to the Ood brain, hampering their free will and leaving them to mix drinks and do laundry for their human masters.

Banik (Farscape): Oppression is a fairly widespread characteristic of the Farscape universe. Pretty much anyone living under Peacekeeper rule has a few humanoid rights trampled on (including the Peacekeepers themselves), and Scarrans have a pair of servant races who provide them with soldiers, intelligence agents, and technicians. But the Baniks hold an especially low place in the Farscape hierarchy. Having been mostly wiped out by Peacekeeper forces, the remaining Baniks have been enslaved, and the Banik Stark is repeatedly subjected to Scorpius' Aurora Chair, a torture and interrogation device. But the casual disregard for the lives of Baniks reaches its most shocking low when Scorpius purchases a lot of slaves that includes 9,999 Baniks and D'Argo's son Jothee. After he purchases the lot, Scorpius hands the slaves over to Natira, who, having no use for them, simply exterminates them all.

Sewer Mutants (Futurama): The 31st Century has little respect for humanoid or alien life, but at least most life forms are afforded the common courtesy of being able to walk the Earth's surface. Sewer mutants have no such privileges, requiring special permission to leave the subterranean ruins of New York. Sewer mutants, in turn, stick it to the sub-mutants, who are relegated to the sub-sewer (probably New York's original sewer system).

House Elves (Harry Potter): House Elves are powerful magical beings, with the ability to repel some of the most powerful wizards to come out of Hogwarts. But most of their magic goes toward serving their often less than noble wizard masters. House Elves are compelled to punish themselves if they disobey their masters or even utter an unkind word against them, and at least one ancient wizarding family held onto a gruesome tradition of decapitating elderly House Elves, then mounting their stuffed heads on the wall.

Dracs (Enemy Mine): Humans and Dracs are in the midst of a bitter war, so it's little surprise that the humans tolerate scavengers who capture Dracs for slave labor. But it also helps a brutal set of outlaws thrive without concern for human laws or Drac life.

Denizens of the Kzinti Empire (Known Space): The Kzinti began their lives in the galactic community as mercenaries, but once their Jotok clients taught them to use their weapons and technology, the Kzinti quickly turned on them, enslaving their former employers. From there, the Kzinti spread out across the galaxy, enslaving or eating any species they encountered. Although some subject worlds were more or less ignored by the Kzinti, some species were pushed off their worlds entirely, and breaking Kzinti law meant execution by hunting (usually followed by a feast featuring the accused as the main course). Even Kzin females, termed Kzinretti, are oppressed by their males, having been rendered subsapient by the hijacked Jotok technology.

Vortigaunt (Half-Life): Vortigaunts are the slaves of slaves, used by the Nihilanth as military forces or as factory workers. Although their enslavement forces the Vortigaunt to oppose Gordon Freeman in the first game, they get a bit of a happy ending when Freeman kills the Nihilanth. Once freed of their extradimensional masters, the Vortigaunts seek to keep humanity from falling to a similar fate, working against the Combine forces.

Neosapiens (Exosquad): Artificially created for life as laborers on Mars, the Neosapiens are stronger and faster than Terran humans, require little food and no sleep, and have a longer natural lifespan than their masters. You would think humans might think twice before creating such a physically advanced race only to enslave them, but they have to deal with the consequences in the ensuing rebellions. But the Neosapiens were not above creating servants of their own, engineering the animalistic Neo Warriors to serve as the Neosapiens' ground forces.

Mutants (X-Men): "Have you tried not being a mutant?" The classic line from X2 pretty much says it all. It's bad enough that the mutants have to cope with powers they don't always fully understand, or that their lives are punctuated by the occasional supervillain attack or alien invasion; they also have to cope with humans who hate and fear them, and religious fanatics who see them as an affront to God.

Cylons (Battlestar Galactica): Artificial beings have been oppressed by humans since Karel Čapek's R.U.R. premiered, and they've been turning on their masters just as long. The Cylons get bonus points, not because the nature of their oppression is unique, but because they're simultaneously portrayed as essentially human and yet dehumanized by their human enemies. Even forgetting racial slurs like "toaster" and "skin job" used to remind humans that their fleshier foes still have robot parts, there are some in the Colonial Fleet, like the rapist members of the Pegasus crew, who are inclined to treat the humanoid Cylons as warm-bodied objects. And the Cylons continue the cycle of oppression, with the humanoid Cylons effectively lobotomizing the Centurions and treating the Raiders as glorified pets.

Humans: Humans are the oppressed species nearly as often as they are the oppressors. Sometimes, we're enslaved by our own creations, as in the Matrix trilogy. Sometimes we've simply lost out as the dominant species of the planet, as in Planet of the Apes. Sometimes an alien invader simply decides we'll make good slaves, as in Stargate or Battlefield Earth. But we're a reliably plucky species, and even if we don't manage to pull ourselves out of the gutter, we don't make life easy for our oppressors.

1. Douglas Quaid, Total Recall

The Setup:

After visiting Rekall in the hopes of going on a virtual vacation of Mars, unassuming nobody Douglas Quaid learns he's actually Hauser, a mindwiped secret agent. He then proceeds to get his ass to Mars, whereupon he becomes embroiled in a tangled web involving evil government operatives, psychic mutants, ancient aliens, and triple-breasted prostitutes. It's all very tense and exciting until a man claiming to from Rekall shows up to point out this is all just the memory implant he ordered gone horribly wrong.

Quaid dismisses this possibility, but the question remains - did he ever actually make it out of Rekall?

The Case For:

Director Paul Verhoeven has occasionally confirmed that the movie really happened, but that was mostly when it looked like the film was going to get a sequel. Perhaps the best evidence that the events seen actually happened is that Arnold Schwarzenegger played Quaid. In the end, is it really any more believable that a guy as impossibly ripped as Schwarzenegger was just a lowly construction worker than that he was a secret agent? And there is the fact that Quaid was dreaming about something similar to his supposedly recovered memories before he ever went to Rekall, but even the movie acknowledges how weak it is to use a dream to disprove virtual reality.

The Case Against:

The guy who claims to be implanted by Rekall to get Quaid out of his broken mind trip not only correctly points out everything that had happened was in line with the adventure Quaid chose, but he also accurately predicts the rest of the movie. (Quaid's logic in this scene also leaves something to be desired. People in virtual reality can't possibly sweat! Shoot him in the head!) For that matter, a Rekall technician at the beginning of the movie says the memory simulator has brought up the unprecedented element of blue skies on Mars for Quaid's trip. And guess what we see at the end of the movie right before the scene fades to white...

Chances That It Really Happened:

10%. Sorry, Quaid, I don't believe you'll be seeing Richter at the party after all.

2. Sam Tyler, Life On Mars (US Version)

The Setup:

The final episode of the American version of Life on Mars offered a rather unexpected resolution to just what had been going on with Sam Tyler all this time. As it turned out, he was neither a cop from 1973 nor one from 2008. Instead, he was part of the first manned expedition to Mars in 2035 and the virtual reality simulation meant to keep his mind busy during the two year trip to the red planet had gone haywire, accidentally sending him from his chosen reality of 2008 to 1973. His friends in 1973 had really been his fellow crew members, and Gene Hunt was really his father, Major Tom Tyler. But was this real, or just another coma fantasy?

The Case For:

To be fair, the makers of Life on Mars had set up this possibility for much of the series, what with all the Mars Rover stuff. Say what you will about the ending, but it wasn't completely random, and the act that Sam immediately accepts this new reality suggests it's the one he expected to find all along, deep down.

The Case Against:

For a start, there's that shot of the loafer as they step out onto the Martian surface right at the very end. It doesn't prove anything, but it undermines the supposed reality of the situation. And then there's the fact that this vision of 2035 really, really seems like the kind of thing a dude in 2008 would come up with. I mean, President Obama? I've already dealt with the logical gymnastics you have to do to get Malia Obama into the White House for her to send off a space mission in 2033. It seems just as likely that 2008 Sam simply came up with one of the very few recognizable names who could be president in 2035.

Then there's the fact that not-Ray describes his virtual reality trip as a deserted island full of women who looked like Splash-era Daryl Hannah or Scarface-era Michelle Pfeiffer. You know, pretty as both of them were in those films, I'm not sure I buy an astronaut fifty years later singling out those specific women for his two year porn dream. (By the way, does his haircut really look like NASA regulation? You'd think he'd have something more like Sam's crewcut in 2035.) Oh, and do we really want to deal with the implications of Sam sleeping with the daughter of Gene Hunt, when Gene Hunt is really his father? I don't think we do.

Chances That He Really Escaped:

30%. The whole thing just seems too contrived to be real, even if I'm pretty sure the creators intended it to be the actual solution.

3. Neo, The Matrix

The Setup:

I don't really need to recap The Matrix, do I? The main thing we're concerned with here is whether ever really got out of the Matrix once he took the red pill, which was briefly a matter of some fan debate back when the film first came out. So, how about it - did he really wake up?

The Case For:

This should be open and shut, really. Even if Neo's adventures are all illusory, the Matrix itself seems to be real. After all, the first scene of the movie features Trinity and the Agents doing impossible things, not Neo. That's fairly objective proof that the Matrix exists. There's also the fact that there were two sequels and an entire anthology of animated spin-offs made after the original Matrix, which would seem to remove any doubt the original actually happened. Why are we even discussing this?

The Case Against:

Well, there are a couple of loose ends worth considering. How, exactly, did Neo shut down all those sentinels at the end of The Matrix Reloaded using only his mind when he was in the supposed real world? I suppose it could have been some sort of residual link, but it certainly raises the question as to whether that world is any more real than that of the Matrix. Then there's what the Architect explains to Neo in Reloaded. He explains that 99% of humanity accepts the Matrix because they can't face the alternative, and the remaining humans wake themselves up and go to Zion.

But what if Zion itself is just another aspect of the Matrix, one that this tiny sliver of humanity is prepared to accept because it's suitably bleak? It certainly wouldn't be the most ridiculously convoluted plan the Architect came up with. As for the argument that the existence of the sequels proves the originally happened as it appeared to, I can't get away from the fact that, in the end, this is the Wachowskis we're talking about. I long ago stopped expecting them to play by the rules of fairness and logic.

Chances That He Really Escaped:

80%. A lot of weird stuff happens in the sequels that doesn't make a lot of sense, but that probably has more to do with them being terrible movies.

4. Buffy Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Setup:

The episode "Normal Again", the Trio unleashes a demon on Buffy that causes her to suffer severe hallucinatory episodes. She suddenly imagines herself in a mental institution, where she is told she has spent much of the last six years in a catatonia. Her doctor and her parents, who are still alive in this world, take advantage of this rare lucid moment to advise her how she can escape forever. The way to do this, however, is to allow all her friends to die, which is ultimately not something she can do. Returning to Sunnydale and taking an antidote to the demon's attack, Buffy commits to her vampire-slaying life as the real one. But did she choose correctly?

The Case For:

Well, that demon who attacked her did have hallucinatory powers. It's also questionable whether she could plausibly develop such a strong connection to the people she knew in her supposed fantasy world, and you'd kind of think the reality of the mental institution would have intruded just a little bit in the preceding six years.

The Case Against:
But all of those supposed arguments are countered and dealt with in the episode itself. And if she did just hallucinate the whole thing, then who exactly is issuing into existence the last scene of the episode, where the doctor sadly informs her parents that Buffy is gone forever? That happens after she took the antidote, so her mind should no longer be creating anything in that reality.

Chances That She Really Escaped:

50%. Because, in the end, it doesn't really matter which world is real and which is an illusion. What really matters is that Buffy chose the world she wanted to be real, and so the answer can remain safely ambiguous.

5. Batman, Batman: The Animated Series

The Setup:

In the 1992 episode "Perchance to Dream", Batman wakes up to find out he isn't really Batman at all. His parents are still alive, he's engaged to Selina Kyle, and someone else is playing the role of Gotham's Dark Knight. After initially rejecting the possibility that this could actually be real and the life he thought he knew nothing more than an intense dream, Bruce realizes he finally has a chance to be happy and have everything he always wanted.

But this moment of contentment is fleeting, as his sudden inability to read tips him off that this is a dream after all. In the final showdown with this world's Batman, he learns the Mad Hatter has him trapped in a dream machine from which there is no possible escape. Which he then escapes from...because he's Batman. But did he really?

The Case For:

It's pretty simple, really. Like I said, this is Batman we're talking about. Mind like a steel trap doesn't even begin to describe Bruce Wayne's intellect and inner resolve, so is it really likely a two-bit villain like the Mad Hatter could trap him for all eternity in a VR machine? When the comic book version of Batman faced a similar situation during Final Crisis, he managed to reassert control and destroy Darkseid's machine before he even woke up. There's just no way you can win in a battle with Batman's mind.

The Case Against:

Well, let's think about this for a second. When "Perchance to Dream" came out, Batman: The Animated Series was still a relatively grounded show. There had certainly been elements of science fiction before that, such as Man-Bat, Mr. Freeze, Clayface, and an invisibility cloak, but by and large the show had remained true to its film noir roots. It's only after this that Batman starts tangling with completely impossible characters like the immortals Ra's Al Ghul and Jason Blood, and it's not long before actually superpowered heroes like Superman start showing up everywhere.

In less than five years, Batman goes from barely defeating a guy who hides in the sewers with a bunch of alligators to confidently leading a Justice League of literally unlimited membership in wars with Brainiac and Darkseid. Maybe Batman's mind could never accept a world where he was completely happy. But what about a world where he could share his burdens with other heroes, a world where anything could happen and it frequently did, a world where he could stand toe to toe with evil gods...and win? That might be exactly the kind of world Batman wanted, and it's just possible the Mad Hatter gave it to him.

Chances That He Really Escaped:

98%. It's a nice theory and all, but come on...Batman doesn't lose.

6. Number Six, The Prisoner

The Setup:

In the series's penultimate episode, the unspeakably brilliant "Once Upon A Time", Number Two made the big push to crack Number Six by subjecting him to a lot of drugs and insane recreations of his life story. This backfires, as Number Six gains the upper hand and instead manages to break Number Two. The final episode, "Fallout", finds Number Six before a bizarre masked court, and then a bunch of crazy (but kind of awesome) stuff happens.

Finally, things take a turn for the incomprehensible as Number Six, the rebellious Number 48, the recovered Number Two, and the Village butler gun down the entire court as the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" plays. They then destroy the Village with a big rocket and find themselves on a motorway back to London, signaling that they've all finally broken free. But did any of that actually happen, or did Number Two really manage to break Number Six back in "Once Upon A Time"?

The Case For:

It's somewhat paradoxical to criticize anything that happened on The Prisoner for being impossible or nonsensical. The entire series is littered with little moments that make absolutely no sense whatsoever and go completely unexplained, even compared to the vaguely understandable main plots. This episode just happens to be nothing but absurdity, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's any less tethered to The Prisoner's fractured take on reality.

The Case Against:

"Fallout" is insane, even by the standards of The Prisoner. (The revelation of Number One's identity is just the bonkers icing on an already demented cake.) And it's not as though the Village hadn't successfully trapped Number Six in illusory worlds before, as seen in "A, B, and C" (which used virtual reality) and "Living in Harmony" (which used a lot of drugs).

For what it's worth, the followup Prisoner comic miniseries, Shattered Visage, ran with the premise that the events of "Fallout" were indeed the Village's last, successful attempt to break the mind of Number Six. Considering Patrick McGoohan read Shattered Visage and said that he didn't hate it - which, by McGoohan's standards, qualified as a rave review - there might actually be something to its version of events.

Chances That He Really Escaped:

Pick a number. Any number. Now divide it by zero. Whatever that number is, that's the probability that Number Six escaped.

Check back this weekend as we examine a few more characters who may well still be trapped in virtual reality, even if they don't know it any more.

According to Levy, history will ultimately realize that the two Matrix sequels just ruined the original movie so much that even Jar-Jar will seem greater in context:

A factor that I think especially fueled the battering of [The Phantom Menace] was the advent a mere month earlier of a genuine classic of science fiction cinema, "The Matrix." ...At the time, the cool kids were absolutely vivid in declaring the Wachowski brothers' film an immortal stunner and to see in Lucas's reemergence an abject failure. Indeed, if you had polled people in the summer of 1999 and asked them which franchise was going to produce better results over the next two films, I'm pretty certain that 90% or more of respondents would have declared for "The Matrix."

Well, with both trilogies complete and behind us, I'm not sure that those people would have been correct in the least. Lucas improved on quite a bit of "SWEP1" in the subsequent prequels, while the Wachowskis absolutely crash-landed "The Matrix" in their sequels to it. (Let's leave off "Speed Racer," shall we, so as not to be overly cruel....) Especially given a decade of reassessment, I'd call Lucas' three-film enterprise by far the more successful.

I'm an entirely impartial judge of this, having a surreal and unexplainable dislike of the Matrix series, so I'm throwing it open to you, dear readers: Did Keanu leave more of a bad taste in your mouth than Hayden Christensen?

SWEP1 + 10 = ? [Oregon Live] (Via Star Wars.com)

Now, we know that this list is going to upset more than a few of you (Especially if you disliked the three Star Wars prequels), but we're not ranking these killer robots in order of awesome - Because then you would have seen IG-88 and KARR, amongst others - nor even in order of evil, but literally in terms of estimated kill-rate. Which robot has killed the most living things? That's all we're interested in.

So, get started with the countdown, and feel free to dispute our choices in the comments. Just don't send a robot after us, to change our minds.

Who else have we missed? Tell all here.

Next: See who didn't make the list.

Next: Science Fiction's Most Killhappy Robots!

Next: Planet-Eating Robots!

Next: Genocidal Robots With A Plan!

Next: Ineffectual-But-Deadly Droids!

Next: Time-Traveling Murder Machines!

Next: Eco-Friendly Killbots!

Next: Mutant-Hunting Robots!

Next: The Self-repairing Murderbot!

Next: Robot Warriors!

According to Variety, studios are considering following Disney's lead (the studio has already released a 3-D version of The Nightmare Before Christmas and have Toy Story 3-D ready to go this summer) and reworking old favorites in the new format. According to the trade paper, tests have already been done to see how Transformers and The Matrix will look in the format.

The problem with the potential of 3-D re-releases, however, may be the cost:

The conversion process can cost around $15 million for a long-ish actioner (about what Jeffrey Katzenberg says it cost DreamWorks to make "Monsters vs. Aliens" a 3-D release), and the transformation typically takes 10 to 14 months. The director is involved at the beginning and the end of the process, but need not be present for most of it.

The conversion is extremely complicated for any film, but costs more for a tentpole, where there can be extensive visual effects and images featuring many people and objects. It can run $100,000 per minute for the most difficult shots — but if a perfectionist director decides to tinker or re-edit, costs go up from there.

With there only being a limited number of 3-D-ready theaters in the country (leading to successes like Coraline being bumped off screens by the underperforming Jonas Brothers movie), studios will have to consider whether it makes financial sense to spend that kind of money just yet, or follow George Lucas' lead; the Star Wars creator announced back in 2005 that he'll be converting the space opera into 3-D, just as soon as there are enough theaters to make it worthwhile.

Studios have 'Monster' 3-D vision [Variety]