A judge has ruled that the Matrix film trilogy did not plagiarize The Immortals, a screenplay Thomas Althouse claimed he submitted to Warner Brothers, who went on to produce the Matrix trilogy, in 1993.
Released in 1999, and directed by Andy and Larry (now Lana) Wachowski, The Matrix tells the story of Keanu Reeves‘ computer hacker who inadvertently discovers that the world as he knows it is but a machine simulation. The original story later spawned two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both of which were released in 2003.
Althouse brought forward the claim that the films were inspired by his own screenplay for The Immortals just last year in California federal court. No one (except for Althouse, presumably) really knows why it took a grand total of 10 years for Althouse to formally make the allegations, though he claims that he didn’t watch the sequels until 2010.
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The Immortals tells the story of a CIA agent who tries to stop a reanimated Adolf Hitler, who along with an army of Nazis had previously been cryogenically frozen, from destroying non-immortals in the year 2235, and Althouse’s claim listed a total of 118 similarities between his script and the Matrix trilogy.
Unfortunately for him, Judge R Gary Klausner ruled there was “no substantial similarity” between the two, adding that “the only similarity in plot [was] that both stories portray a protagonist attempting to prevent a dominant group from oppressing and annihilating a subservient group.”
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Exemplifying the linguistic device of understatement, the judge’s ruling continued, “The basic premises of The Matrix Trilogy and The Immortals are so different that it would be unreasonable to find their plots substantially similar. Examining the protectable details in the two works, no jury could reasonably conclude that The Immortals has substantially similar expressions of ideas to The Matrix Trilogy.”
Swiftly moving on, does anyone want to make The Immortals a reality, because I very much want to make The Immortals a reality?
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