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Marvin continued, his tone almost conversational. "If you'd treated me like someone you wanted to do business with instead of someone you could negotiate around, I might have considered Miramax."
Harvey's smile disappeared. "Might have?"
"Maybe."
"You would've considered it?"
"Of course." Marvin looked genuinely puzzled by Harvey's reaction. "You make good films."
Harvey said nothing.
"I like what you do." That should have sounded like a compliment. Somehow, it didn't.
Marvin took another sip. "But Alan Horn came to me directly."
Harvey's jaw tightened. "He sat down with me. He listened to what I wanted. His lawyers dealt with mine without playing games." He gave
Harvey a polite smile.
"That matters."
'Is this kid actually mocking me to my face?!'
Harvey felt heat climb into his face.
He'd spent years getting people to chase him. Actors wanted his movies. Directors wanted his money. Writers wanted his approval. Studios wanted his awards.
And now this kid was standing there, calmly explaining why somebody else had gotten the property.
Harvey's hands curled at his sides.
He wanted to tell Marvin exactly what he thought of him. A surge of pure anger flared in Harvey's chest. His hands balled into tight fists, his knuckles turning white. But he suppressed the outburst with all his remaining corporate might. He forced a strained fake smile that didn't reach his cold eyes and replied,
Instead, he smiled.
It was the smile he used when he was furious and couldn't afford to show it. "Well, that's business."
"Exactly." Marvin nodded. "So there's really nothing to be upset about."
Harvey held his gaze. "Who said I'm upset?"
Marvin's smile widened by the smallest amount. "Nobody."
That was worse.
Harvey forced out a laugh. "You're a piece of work, you know that?"
"I've heard that too."
Harvey shook his head. "All right. Fine. Warner got there first."
"They did."
"Maybe next time I'll get there first."
Marvin raised his glass slightly. "Then I suppose you'll have to come find me."
Harvey stared at him. Then he laughed once. "Yeah." He lifted his own glass. "I'll do that."
Marvin turned away. "Good."
He took another step. Behind him, Harvey's smile finally vanished. His eyes followed Marvin through the room. 'We'll see.'
Marvin didn't look back.
He didn't need to. He could already feel Harvey's anger following him across the ballroom.
And somehow, that made the night a little more enjoyable.
Marvin knew exactly what he'd done.
Unless something happened to change the entire game, his relationship with "the fat man" was finished before it had even properly started. They might never become public enemies, but working together again would be another matter. The insult would linger. Men with egos like his didn't forget being embarrassed.
Marvin didn't care.
If Meyers Studios was going to become a global powerhouse, people were going to get hurt along the way. Partners would turn into rivals. Rivals would turn into enemies. Some would lose money, some would gain it. Others would lose their place in the industry altogether.
That was business. And Marvin had no intention of stopping.
One day, he would beat them all. Not just financially, but at the box office, in the press, in the culture. He'd keep climbing until the trades stopped talking about Hollywood's Big Six.
Meyers Studios.
And the other Four.
Moving through a knot of agents and B-list actors, Marvin's attention had already moved on. The little dispute behind him wasn't worth another thought.
His mind was somewhere much bigger.
A studio couldn't become an empire on psychological thrillers and cheap vampire movies alone. Those could make money, even become hits, but they weren't enough.
He needed movies people couldn't forget.
Franchises that could run for years. Characters that could sell toys, games, DVDs, clothes. IPs that could pull people into theme parks and keep them coming back. Anything with a logo on it.
Movies that made money at the box office, then kept making it long after the theaters emptied and the graves were dug.
That was the kind of empire he wanted.
Whether he acted personally or quietly moved assets through Meyers Studios' shell companies, Marvin had already secured the prize he wanted.
*The Matrix*.
He hadn't stopped with the first script. He had written the entire trilogy from memory: *The Matrix*, *The Matrix: Reloaded*, and *The Matrix: Revolutions*. All three were already registered with the WGA under Zenith's copyright, locked down long before anyone else could even conceive of the concept, even though he wouldn't begin work on them until after Malèna.
In his previous timeline, *The Matrix* should have been in theaters that summer, arriving in 1999 like a bomb. It hadn't just been a successful science-fiction movie. It had changed the way people looked at action films.
And it had changed Keanu Reeves' career with it.
The man who had struggled to escape the shadow of *Speed* had suddenly become one of the biggest stars in the world. Before long, he was commanding $20 million paydays, standing alongside names like Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks.
That was why Marvin had taken the time to write the scripts and register them so early. He'd done the same thing with Malèna to capture Monica. He wasn't going to make the *Harry Potter* mistake twice.
He wanted the board before anyone else knew there was a game.
But his version of *The Matrix* wouldn't follow the same path.
The first film remained close to what Marvin remembered. The sequels were another story.
In the previous timeline, the Wachowskis had been handed enormous budgets after the first film became a phenomenon. Reloaded and Revolutions were shot back-to-back, and with Warner Bros. too afraid to interfere with the filmmakers behind their golden goose, the directors had been given almost complete freedom.
It showed.
The sequels became heavier, more self-indulgent, and far less interested in the raw momentum that had made the first film so effective. The philosophy began swallowing the story. The pacing dragged. And Revolutions pushed it furthest.
Marvin could still grimace at the thought of it.
Warner Bros. had let the filmmakers do whatever they wanted.
Which was how the climax could grind to a halt for nearly eight minutes while Neo sat across from the Architect in that blinding white room, surrounded by television screens.
Two men in chairs. Talking.
Explaining the Matrix, the One, Zion, the cycles of the system, and the illusion of choice while the supposed climax of one of the biggest action franchises in Hollywood history simply stopped dead.
Marvin had no intention of making that mistake.
It was cinematic suicide for a summer blockbuster.
The first Matrix had made people want to believe. The sequels, had sometimes made them feel like they were sitting through a philosophy lecture between action scenes.
The problem wasn't that the ideas were too complicated. The problem was that the ideas had started getting in the way of the movie.
Reloaded had too many detours. Too many conversations that repeated what the audience already understood. The Merovingian, the Keymaker, the Oracle, the Architect—great characters and great concepts, but too often the story stopped so someone could explain the rules to the audience.
Marvin cut that shit out.
Every conversation had to earn its place. Every philosophical idea had to come through the characters, the choices they made, or the world itself. Nobody was going to sit in a chair for ten minutes and explain the plot.
The action had to matter, too.
The highway sequence stayed, but Marvin tightened everything around it. The Chateau fight became shorter and nastier. The Burly Brawl became more focused instead of turning into an endless demonstration of computer-generated Smiths. The freeway chase wasn't there simply because it looked expensive. It moved the characters where they needed to go, revealed something about the Machines, and pushed the story toward the next act.
And Revolutions needed even more work.
Marvin wasn't throwing away the war. He was making the war mean something.
The siege of Zion became the emotional backbone of the final film rather than an extended interruption between Neo's visions and conversations. The audience would understand what Zion meant before the Machines arrived. They would know the people defending it. They would have something to lose.
Neo's final journey wouldn't feel like he had wandered into another movie halfway through the trilogy, either.
The Oracle, the Architect, the Merovingian, the Machines, Smith—they all had to be pulling on the same thread.
And then Marvin rebuilt the Machine civilization itself.
The machines weren't keeping humanity alive because they needed human bodies as batteries.
That explanation had always been very stupid.
Eight billion human minds were not merely a source of electricity. They were eight billion consciousnesses. Eight billion unique ways of recognizing patterns, solving problems, imagining possibilities, making connections, creating things that no single machine could predict.
A civilization of machines had eventually discovered something far more valuable than human biology.
Human thought. So the Matrix wasn't a power plant. It was a computer.
A living, planetary-scale computational system built from billions of connected human minds. A processing architecture so vast that even the machines that created it could no longer fully comprehend everything happening inside it.
Quantum computers could calculate possibilities.
The Matrix could create them.
Every human mind contributed something different—memory, intuition, emotion, irrationality, imagination, instinct. Together, they formed something approaching a new kind of intelligence.
And at the center of it all was the Machine Intelligence.
Not a cold calculator. Not a mindlessly logical computer. Something Marvin found far more frightening.
It could understand human emotion. It could empathize. It could love. It could mourn. And it could still decide that humanity had to be controlled if that was what survival required.
That made the Machines terrifying.
They weren't evil because they couldn't understand humanity.
They were terrifying because they understood humanity perfectly and could still choose what they believed was necessary.
That was the idea Marvin built the entire trilogy around.
The Matrix wasn't simply humanity's prison.
It was the greatest creation of the Machine civilization.
And the Machines weren't simply keeping humanity asleep.
They were using humanity to create something neither species could have created alone.
That gave Neo's final choice actual weight.
He wasn't just fighting to destroy a computer program.
He was fighting against an entire civilization whose intelligence had been built partly from humanity itself.
So Marvin's trilogy became something very different.
The philosophy remained. He simply refused to let it stop the movie.
The audience could think about the questions afterward. While they were sitting in the theater, Marvin wanted them watching.
It would be a commercial action spectacle first, and a philosophical treatise a distant second. The central, guiding idea behind his version of the trilogy could be summed up in three simple words: "Rule of Cool."
It was simple. If a scene didn't move the story, deepen a character, reveal something important, or make the audience's jaw drop, it was gone.
No sacred cows. No indulgent speeches. No eight-minute conversation in a white room while the climax died around it.
The trilogy would be smart enough to reward people who wanted to dig deeper and entertaining enough that everyone else could simply enjoy the ride.
That was Marvin's version of *The Matrix*.
Same world. Same core ideas.
But sharper, faster, darker—and built to leave the audience wanting the next film instead of wondering when the talking would end.
Marvin still hadn't decided whether he wanted the Wachowskis directing the whole thing.
Judging by the first movie alone, they could make something extraordinary. They had done it and had the eye for it —provided someone with actual corporate power puts a tight, creative leash on them.
Still, the trilogy would be shot back-to-back. Marvin already had the finished scripts and storyboards, the schedule will be locked, and the production moving from one film straight into the next. There wouldn't be much room for them to wander off into their own little philosophical universe.
And he couldn't deny what they brought to the table.
Bullet time. Wire work. The impossible camera moves. gravity-defying wire-fu leaps, and staging explosive, meticulously choreographed action scenes. Those were all the essential, irreplaceable trademarks of their style that the franchise needed.
The kind of action that made people forget they were watching actors and start wondering how the hell anyone had filmed it.
He needed that.
So he'd probably give them the job.
Once the trilogy was finished, though, that would be it. Marvin had no interest in making a habit of working with directors who needed to be reined in every five minutes.
Besides, they would likely be far too busy transitioning into "sisters" and living their truth to have the time or energy to direct massive studio movies anyway!
****
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