Hollywood has struggled turning video games into viable movie franchises for the better part of 30 years, and it's a little ironic that Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil would be the one to break the mold, spawning a six-film series that earned over $1.2 billion at the box office.
Based on how Netflix have been responding to the movie's performance so far, the boardroom will be desperate to get a sequel to action blockbuster Red Notice into active development as quickly as possible, especially given the hectic schedules of the three A-list stars.
Cary Joji Fukunaga, Daniel Craig and the rest of the No Time to Die team would have been celebrating wildly after it was confirmed that the 25th installment in the James Bond franchise had passed Fast & Furious 9 to become the highest-grossing Hollywood movie to hit theaters since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was released in December 2019.
While it's obviously a fact that a fourth installment in the franchise is incoming, with the movie set to hit theaters and HBO Max on December 22, nobody involved in the production has come right out and said that The Matrix Resurrections is a direct sequel to the original trilogy.
The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it, in an onscreen capacity at least, can be directly attributed to Robert Downey Jr. Had Iron Man not become a critical and commercial smash hit, rejuvenating the actor's career and turning him into an A-list star overnight, then the franchise as we know it could have turned out much differently.
Kevin Feige admitted that he was nervous about telling Jeremy Renner that plans for a Hawkeye solo movie had been abandoned, but given that we're less than 24 hours away from Clint Barton's very own Disney Plus show arriving on streaming, it's all worked out pretty well in the end.
The trouble with video game adaptations in general is that many of them fail to strike the balance between pandering to the core fanbase and appealing to those unfamiliar with the source material, which often ends up creating a discrepancy between the critical and fan consensus, which in turn may affect box office takings.