Over the course of their long and eclectic career, Lana and Andy Wachowski have gained a reputation as filmmakers who tend to paint with broad strokes, creating cinematic universes riddled with creativity and imagination. It’s a passionate drive that has been tapered by studios in the past, all in the effort to engineer a feasible, two-hour long experience to attract as wide an audience as possible. But this concession often clips said film’s proverbial wings.
According to Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, this stifling effect evidently occurred within the pair’s Cloud Atlas, after he revealed that an extensive four-hour long version of the time-hopping epic exists, and tells the inspiring store free from compromise.
Their film reviews have been brutal, and everything after ‘The Matrix’ didn’t go well, but if you look at the earlier cuts of their films before they had to jam them down to 120 minutes, it’s amazing. There’s a four-hour cut of ‘Cloud Atlas’ that will blow you away.
In the extract, Sarandos is also alluding to the Wachowski’s Jupiter Ascending, which was released recently to mixed-to-negative reviews — including our own. But after delivering a string of box office flops, it looks to be the case that the filmmaking siblings will begin to distant themselves from the blockbuster space over the coming years, as studios are going to be more apprehensive about leasing them a triple-A budget, regardless of the The Matrix‘s 16-year old legacy.
“Everyone says, ‘Why can’t you be simpler?’ We’re drawn toward difficult subjects, like the disparity of rich and poor,” Lana Wachowski told The Wall Street Journal last month. “We’ve been lucky. People at studios have been interested in our crazy, strange brand of complexity. And we’ve been allowed to keep making them. Will that continue? Probably not.”
The Wachowski’s next project, Sense8, is due to arrive exclusively on Netflix at some point in the near future, a platform that will hopefully provide the directors with a greater sense of creative freedom. But do you think the pair have lost their touch when it comes to storytelling? Or are their visions being stifled by red tape? Let us know your thoughts down below.
