Wachowski Blames Fascism, Studios See a Box-Office Record

Lilly Wachowski, the co-director of The Matrix, told the trade outlet IndieWire she cannot get her latest passion projects greenlit because fascism is thriving across the movie industry. Studios looking at the same résumé weigh something blunter: a string of nine-figure box-office losses that has frozen her budgets, a pattern Hollywood has run on costly directors for decades.

Two finished scripts sit with no buyers. It is a familiar bind for a certain kind of big-swing director, and the route out is getting narrower as cheaper filmmakers quietly take the same shelf space.

What Wachowski Told IndieWire

Wachowski sat down with IndieWire to mark 30 years since Bound, the 1996 crime thriller she made with her sister Lana before the two reset how action films get cut and shot. The conversation turned to why her own slate has stalled. She has two scripts ready to go. One, called The Hunted, she describes as a gonzo political thriller about a trans weather underground, written with her partner. The other, Cosmonauts, is a comic-book adaptation. Neither has a studio attached.

Her diagnosis was structural and political.

I feel like the industry is a microcosm of what is happening all around the world: the consolidation of wealth, the corporate consolidation that you’re seeing. It’s creating an ecosphere where fascism can thrive, and so within that ecosphere, queer stories, trans stories, Black and brown stories are all on the chopping block.

That is the frame she offers. The number behind it is her commercial record. The Matrix earned more than $460 million worldwide against a reported $63 million budget, and that single hit bought the sisters a long creative leash. The films that came after spent it. The last time Wachowski sat in a director’s chair was Jupiter Ascending in 2015.

The Box-Office Math Studios See

Studios don’t read manifestos before they cut a check. They read recoupment. A theatrical release returns only about half of its ticket sales to the studio, because the cinemas keep the rest, and once prints and advertising are added a film generally needs to gross roughly two and a half times its production budget just to break even. Measured that way, three Wachowski films in a row came up short.

Speed Racer didn’t clear its budget at all. Cloud Atlas grossed above its cost but was financed partly outside the studios precisely because no single one wanted the full risk. Jupiter Ascending, the priciest of the three, took in about $184 million worldwide and still left Warner Bros nursing a reported loss near $120 million once marketing was counted, per the box-office comparison of the three Wachowski tentpoles. By reported estimates, the combined write-downs run close to a quarter of a billion dollars. Any executive approving The Hunted is betting that run reverses.

Hollywood’s Director’s Jail Isn’t New

The freeze has a nickname inside the business: Director’s Jail. It is where filmmakers go after an expensive flop, and the politics of the moment rarely have much to do with the sentence. The roster is long and crosses every era and ideology.

• Michael Cimino won the Best Director Oscar for The Deer Hunter, then watched 1980’s Heaven’s Gate help bankrupt United Artists. He directed only a handful of films afterward and never got his standing back.
• Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win Best Director, saw her 2017 drama Detroit stall at the box office and did not release another feature until the 2025 Netflix thriller A House of Dynamite.
• Wachowski herself name-checks veterans like John Waters and John Sayles, both of whom have spent years unable to fund the films they want to make.

The throughline is money, not message. A studio that just absorbed a loss tends to want the next bet smaller and safer, whoever is pitching it. Sofia Coppola hit a version of the same wall this year when she walked away from a Kirsten Dunst period film she called too sad for dark times. Different reason, same outcome: a finished vision with nowhere to land.

Where the Critic Complaint Lands

Earlier in the IndieWire talk, Wachowski went after film critics, and here the picture is more complicated than her box office. She traced her distrust to Bound’s premiere at Sundance, when a Variety review by the critic Todd McCarthy landed the morning of the screening. As she put it, he just trashed the film. The movie played well with the crowd anyway, but the sting stuck.

She went further, arguing that hostile reviews often have nothing to do with the film on screen. By her account the motives are sometimes seeped-in misogyny, sometimes seeped-in homophobia, and a lot of the time seeped-in anti-socialist tendencies. The first half of that has some support. Critics carry biases, and plenty of reviews say more about a writer’s politics than about a movie’s craft. Comedian Jim Gaffigan has publicly complained about reviewers panning elements of his work that weren’t in the film.

The charge that the critical press, which leans solidly to the left, is broadly homophobic and misogynist is harder to square with how that same press has championed queer and women-led cinema for years. Wachowski has long fought over how her work gets read, including her objection to the way the political right adopted the red-pill metaphor she helped create, a dispute she revisited when she criticized the MAGA movement’s use of the Matrix image. The instinct to read rejection as ideology is consistent. It is also, on the funding question, the part that the spreadsheet keeps undercutting.

The Cheaper Route Other Directors Took

While Wachowski waits on roughly $176 million worth of trust for Jupiter-scale ambition, a younger group is getting greenlit by spending almost nothing. Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old who built an audience as the YouTube creator behind The Backrooms, made his feature for A24 and opened to a record $81.4 million domestically for a first-time director with an original film, near $118 million worldwide.

Curry Barker, 26, made his horror hit Obsession for $750,000 and watched Focus Features buy it for $15 million; one studio reportedly offered him $10 million for his next project before he had even pitched it. Together the two films cost about $11 million to produce and have pulled in more than $185 million domestically, a return profile reshaping how studios scout young directors.

That is the competition for the same money Wachowski needs, and it is winning on math she cannot match at her preferred scale. A studio can lose on a $750,000 movie and barely notice. It cannot lose on a third straight nine-figure swing and keep its job. The greenlight she wants is available; it just runs through a budget she has never worked in.