I am being told that the Wachowskis, who made "The Matrix" trilogy, "Bound," "V for Vendetta" and "Speed Racer," and "Cloud Atlas" are closing their Ravenswood Avenue office, which they have operated out of for more than a decade.
Lilly and Lana Wachowski hit rock bottom after their Netflix series "Sense 8" was cancelled despite having ended with a cliffhanger in expectation of a third season, then under negotiation. Netflix did eventually produced a two-and-a-half-hour series finale, released on June 8, 2018.
However, it was "Jupiter Ascending" that did the Wachowskis in. I'm assuming the news of their offices closing is supposed to be seen as a silent retirement. I had heard that they'd been struggling to get funding for their projects until Netflix picked up sense8. Kinda sad really, they were one of the more experimental filmmakers out there even though the execution wasn't always on point, to say the least...
They had a limited budget with "The Matrix" but made their best film, by far, due to the constraints and the ability to be creative with limitations at hand. Once they hit pay dirt with "The Matrix" the Wachowskis went out of control and had the creative freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted to make. Bad idea. It got out of hand. Despite the ambitions of "Cloud Atlas," "Jupiter Ascending" and Sense 8," there was a maudlin-kind of ineptitude to these films, a pseudo-scientific preachiness that felt inauthentic. I do hope that maybe they can go back to making smaller scaled stuff like their debut "Bound," which everybody seems to agree was a real gem of an indie.