It's still fascinating how much Dark City spent on sets, how poorly it did in the box office, and how quickly WB let The Matrix team ransack the sets. One of th

It's still fascinating how much Dark City spent on sets, how poorly it did in the box office, and how quickly WB let The Matrix team ransack the sets. One of the factors in The Matrix's huge success at the time was that it was relatively cheap because of that leg up. It's one of the biggest visual differences between the first film and the sequels: the first film started from and benefited from Dark City's unique set design. (It's another thing I think makes the sequels better as movies because there was less aesthetic clash when the teams had full control of the sets and weren't just reusing/abusing great sets from a different team with an entirely different aesthetic design.)