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It's a vidio game, it shows us a distopia world called "night city", cuberpunk is a tipe of distopia world imagenation. In the night ctiy, seems the people are free, but the truth is the government are useless, the Prosthetic body company are controling the people in the city...

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It's a vidio game, it shows us a distopia world called "night city", cuberpunk is a tipe of distopia world imagenation. In the night ctiy, seems the people are free, but the truth is the government are useless, the Prosthetic body company are controling the people in the city...

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Cyberpunk 2077 is a 2020 action role-playing video game developed by CD Projekt Red and published by CD Projekt, based on video game designer Mike Pondsmith's game series. Set in a dystopian cyberpunk universe, the player assumes the role of "V" (played by Gavin Drea/ Cherami Leigh), a mercenary in the fictional Californian city known as "Night City", where they deal with the fallout from a heist gone wrong that results in an experimental cybernetic "bio-chip" containing an engram of the legendary rock star and terrorist Johnny Silverhand (played by Keanu Reeves) threatening to slowly overwrite V's mind; as the story progresses V and Johnny must work together to find a way to be separated and save V's life.

The game's development began following the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine (2016). The game was developed by a team of around 500 people using the REDengine 4 game engine. CD Projekt launched a new division in Wrocław, Poland, and partnered with Digital Scapes, Nvidia, QLOC, and Jali Research to aid the production. Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith was a consultant, and actor Keanu Reeves had a starring role. The original score was led by Marcin Przybyłowicz, and featured the contributions of several licensed artists. After years of anticipation, CD Projekt released Cyberpunk 2077 for PlayStation 4, Stadia, Windows, and Xbox One on 10 December 2020, followed by PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 15 February 2022.

Cyberpunk 2077 received praise from critics for its narrative, setting, and graphics. However, some of its gameplay elements received mixed responses while its themes and representation of transgender characters received some criticism. It was also widely criticized for bugs, particularly in the console versions which suffered from performance problems. Sony removed it from the PlayStation Store from December 2020 to June 2021 while CD Projekt rectified some of the problems. CD Projekt became subject to investigations and class-action lawsuits for their perceived attempts at downplaying the severity of the technical problems before release; these were ultimately cleared with a settlement of US$1.85 million. By October 2023, the game had sold over 25 million units. An expansion, Phantom Liberty, released for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S on 26 September 2023, which sold 4.3 million units by November 2023. Its total cost to develop and market (including updates and DLC) is reportedly over $436 million, making it one of the most expensive video games to develop. A sequel, codenamed "Project Orion", was announced in October 2022.

Gameplay screenshot of the player-character completing a mission

Cyberpunk 2077 is an action role-playing game played from a first-person perspective as V, a mercenary whose voice, face, hairstyle, body type and modifications, background, and clothing are customisable. Stat categories-Body, Intelligence, Reflexes, Technical, and Cool-influence player's gameplay style. The three primary play styles are Netrunner ( hacking), Techie ( machinery), and Solo ( combat). V must consult a "ripperdoc" to upgrade and purchase cyberware implants. The rarity of any given equipment is shown by a coloured tier system. V can take cover, aim, run, jump, double jump, and slide. Melee strikes can be dealt with close-combat weapons. There are three types of ranged weapons, all of which can be customised and modified-Power (standard), Tech (which penetrates walls and enemies), and Smart (with homing bullets). Ranged weapons are equipped to ricochet bullets in a target's direction and slow them down in bullet time. Four types of damage can be inflicted and resisted-Physical, Thermal, Electric, and Chemical. Weapon use increases accuracy and reloading speed, which are manifested in character animations. The game can be completed without killing anyone, with non-lethal options for weapons and cyberware.

The open world metropolis of Night City consists of six regions; the corporate City Centre, immigrant-inhabited Watson, luxurious Westbrook, suburban Heywood, gang-infested Pacifica, and industrial Santo Domingo. Its surrounding area, the Badlands, can also be explored. V navigates these locations on foot and in vehicles, which are subject to either a third- or first-person view. Pedestrians are vulnerable to vehicular collisions. Depending on the location, law enforcement may be alerted if V commits a crime. Radio stations are available to listen to. The full day-night cycle and dynamic weather affect the way non-player characters (NPCs) behave. V owns an apartment and a garage. Night City features non-English-speaking characters, whose languages can be translated with special implants. "Braindance" is a device that allows V to undergo other people's experiences. Branching dialogues enable interaction with NPCs and actions in quests. Experience points are obtained from main quests and fuel the stats; side quests yield "street cred", unlocking skills, vendors, places, and additional quests. Quests are acquired from characters known as Fixers. Throughout the game, V is aided by various companions. Consumables, like soft drinks, are used for healing, and objects can be inspected in V's inventory. Minigames include hacking, boxing, auto racing, martial arts, and shooting ranges. The player's in-game choices can lead to different endings.

Night City is an American megacity in the Free State of North California, controlled by corporations and unassailed by the laws of both country and state. It sees conflict from rampant gang wars and its ruling entities contending for dominance. The city relies on robotics for everyday aspects like waste collection, maintenance, and public transportation. Its visual identity is derived from the four eras it underwent-austere Entropism, colourful Kitsch, imposing Neo-Militarism, and opulent Neo-Kitsch. Homelessness abounds but does not preclude cybernetic modification for the poor, giving rise to cosmetic addiction, and consequent violence. Those whose addictions and heavy cyberization have rendered them mentally unstable, often referred to as cyberpsychos, are dealt with by the armed force known as MaxTac. Trauma Team can be employed for rapid medical services. Because of the constant threat of physical harm, all citizens are allowed to carry firearms in public openly.

The game begins with the selection of one of three lifepaths for the player character V ( Gavin Drea or Cherami Leigh): Nomad, Streetkid, or Corpo. All three lifepaths involve V starting a new life in Night City with local thug Jackie Welles (Jason Hightower) and working together as mercenaries with a netrunner, T-Bug (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams).

In 2077, local fixer Dexter "Dex" DeShawn ( Michael-Leon Wooley) hires V and Jackie to steal a biochip known as "the Relic" from Arasaka Corporation. They acquire the Relic, but the plan goes awry when they witness the murder of the megacorp's leader Saburo Arasaka ( Masane Tsukayama) at the hands of his treacherous son Yorinobu (Hideo Kimura). Yorinobu covers up the murder as poisoning and triggers a security sweep in which Arasaka's netrunners kill T-Bug. V and Jackie escape, but Jackie is fatally wounded in the process, and the Relic's protective case is damaged, forcing V to insert the biochip into the cyberware in their head.

Furious at the unwanted police attention, Dex shoots V in the head and leaves them for dead in a landfill. Upon awakening, V is haunted by the digital ghost of war veteran turned iconic rock star and terrorist Johnny Silverhand ( Keanu Reeves), believed to have died in 2023 during his own thermonuclear attack on Arasaka Tower. V learns from their ripperdoc Viktor Vector ( Michael Gregory) that Dex's bullet triggered resurrection nanotech on the biochip, repairing the damage to V's brain but starting an irreversible process to overwrite their memories with those of Johnny, whose memory engram is stored on the chip, leaving V only a few weeks before the process completes. The biochip cannot be removed without instantly killing V, so V must find a way to remove Johnny and survive.

Through reliving Johnny's memories, V learns that in 2013, Johnny's then-girlfriend Alt Cunningham ( Alix Wilton Regan) had created Soulkiller, an artificial intelligence able to copy netrunners' minds through their neural links. However, the process destroyed the target's brain. Arasaka kidnapped Alt and forced her to create their own version of Soulkiller, which would store the minds of its targets in Arasaka's digital fortress, Mikoshi. Johnny led a rescue effort to save Alt, but failed to find her before Arasaka used Soulkiller on her; Johnny's later thermonuclear attack was a cover to free Alt's consciousness from Arasaka's subnet, but Arasaka's head of security Adam Smasher ( Alec Newman) captured him and used Soulkiller on him as well.

By 2077, Arasaka was advertising a "Secure Your Soul" program and conducting secret research into writing a digital copy of a mind into a living human brain, from which the Relic arose. Eventually, V must decide whether to mount an attack on Arasaka Tower to gain physical access to Mikoshi and use Soulkiller to remove Johnny from their body or to make a deal with Arasaka to extract the Relic.

Depending upon player actions throughout the game, V can choose different options to conduct the attack. V can allow Johnny to take over and stage the attack with his former crew, suppress Johnny and mount the attack with Nomad allies, mount the attack solo, or simply commit suicide. Regardless, after beating Adam and either successfully using Soulkiller or after having Arasaka perform surgery on them, it is revealed that the damage to V's body is irreversible. Depending on player choice, V either requests Arasaka to be uploaded into Mikoshi until a suitable host body is found, remains in their body with an uncertain life expectancy, or allows Johnny to take over permanently. If the latter is taken, Johnny pays his respects to his friends and leaves Night City to start a new life.

After concluding the Voodoo Boys business in Pacifica, V is contacted by Song "Songbird" So Mi (Minji Chang), the aide of NUSA President Rosalind Myers (Kay Bess). She explains that their transport, Space Force One, has been hacked over Night City and is about to crash in the lawless district of Dogtown. Songbird asks V to help rescue Myers in return for her assistance in preventing the Relic from destroying V's brain. Songbird also warns V that the warlord who rules Dogtown, Kurt Hansen (Eliah Mountjoy), will likely attempt to use the opportunity to kidnap Myers. V is able to extract Myers from the crash site and escort her to a safehouse, but they lose contact with Songbird on the way. At the safehouse, Johnny warns V that Songbird and Myers may be hiding secrets from them.

The next morning, Songbird is still missing in action. A concerned Myers asks V to make contact with Solomon Reed ( Idris Elba), a NUSA sleeper agent stationed in Dogtown. Reed agrees to help, but V learns that Reed was abandoned by the NUSA in Night City after Reed narrowly survived an assassination attempt by Arasaka. They enlist the aid of a fellow agent named Alexa "Alex" Xenakis (Yvonne Senat Jones) and an underworld netrunner named Slider, who traces Songbird's trail. He is shocked to discover that Songbird penetrated the Blackwall, the firewall that protects the world from rogue AIs inhabiting the old Net, to make contact with V. Slider is able to reestablish contact with Songbird, who tells V she is in Hansen's custody, but Slider is killed when his connection short-circuits.

V regroups with Reed in his safehouse, where he reveals that the NUSA ordered Songbird to sell him out to Arasaka. He also discloses that Songbird has been probing the Blackwall under Myers' orders, which is prohibited by international law. Regardless, Reed wants to rescue Songbird, so he and V infiltrate Hansen's headquarters. They meet Songbird, who explains that her mind has been corrupted by the Blackwall, but Hansen possesses a device called the Neural Matrix that can cure both her and V's conditions. Songbird sets up a plan to steal the matrix from Hansen, while Reed and V realize that the plane crash was orchestrated by Songbird so that she could reach Hansen and acquire the matrix to save herself. V then has a choice: let Songbird complete her objective or betray her using an icebreaker given to them by Reed.

If V betrays Songbird, she will secure the matrix but succumb to cyberpsychosis after recognizing V's treachery. Songbird alerts Hansen, who then kills Alex. V kills Hansen in pursuit of Songbird, but cannot stop her from fleeing to Cynosure, an old Militech facility meant to counter Soulkiller. By the time V catches up, Songbird is already succumbing to the Blackwall's effects. Depending on V's choices, they either euthanize Songbird to prevent her from falling into NUSA custody, or hand her over to Reed so he can help her.

If V goes along with Songbird, Alex kills Hansen while V and Songbird flee the area. Songbird then enlists V to help her escape from Night City's spaceport to the Moon. On the way there, Songbird admits to V that the matrix will disintegrate after being used once, so it can only save one of them. V is left with the decision to surrender Songbird into Reed's custody or assist Songbird's launch to the Moon, the latter of which leads to a standoff with Reed dying.

If Reed and Songbird both survive, a new ending to the game is unlocked. Myers congratulates V for completing their mission and Reed informs them that the matrix can be used to cure V. If V accepts, NUSA surgeons use the matrix to successfully remove the Relic from V's brain, but the surgery fully deletes Johnny, puts V in a two-year coma (during which most of V's friends move on), and causes irreparable damage to V's brain that renders them unable to use combat implants. Being unable to return to their old life as a mercenary, V is forced to accept that they must live quietly as a regular civilian from now on.

Mike Pondsmith was consulted by CD Projekt Red on the development of Cyberpunk 2077' s story.

Preliminary work on Cyberpunk 2077 began following the release of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition (2012). CD Projekt Red-CD Projekt's internal development studio-approached Mike Pondsmith, the writer of and founder of R. Talsorian Games, in early 2012, sending him a copy of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011). Impressed with the studio's unparalleled knowledge of the Cyberpunk universe at the time, Pondsmith and CD Projekt Red reached an agreement to license s story from the year 2077 onward to CD Projekt Red, while Pondsmith retained the rights for media in the Cyberpunk universe set up until the year 2077. To ensure s story remained cohesive during development, Pondsmith served as a consultant on Cyberpunk 2077. Pondsmith's experience at Microsoft developing games such as Crimson Skies (2000) and (2001), and at Monolith Productions developing The Matrix Online (2005), provided valuable wisdom to CD Projekt Red, in comparison to Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski's indifference towards the studio during the development of The Witcher (2007) and The Witcher 2.

The concept of Cyberpunk 2077 was adapted from Pondsmith's Cyberpunk series. Antithetical to the stereotypical cyberpunk genre, the concepts explored in Cyberpunk evoke a sense of rebellion and whimsy while retaining the genre's grim tone. The protagonist of Cyberpunk-in comparison to the typical archetype of a hero attempting to save the world-attempts to save himself, from a downtrodden and lowly perspective. Lead gameplay designer Marcin Janiszewski sought to remind players of its connection to the Cyberpunk universe, writing, "We want to assure fans of the pen-and-paper game that this is still the same Cyberpunk you know". In comparison to CD Projekt Red's development on The Witcher series, the time difference between the events of Cyberpunk and Cyberpunk 2077 allotted the studio more freedom towards adapting the series, although they attempted to stay true to Pondsmith's original works.

Cyberpunk 2077, by extension, presents an alternate history, in which the United States became mired in wars in Central America in the 1980s deeply undermining its power and economy, the Soviet Union failed to dissolve and Japan became a superpower, diffusing its culture as far as California. The events of Cyberpunk 2077 take place in the fictitious Night City, a megalopolis immersed in Japanese culture that lies between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Stereotypical cyberpunk motifs, such as sadism, commercialization, cruelty, and satisfaction, remain as mainstays in the political landscape of Night City. A hedonistic wonderland, Night City is divided into two distinct classes: the downtrodden, who use psychedelic substances and physically augmented sex workers as a form of escapism, while the elite corporate class (known as "corpos") dominate society and are afforded great financial success.

The script was first written in Polish and translated into English, a standard practice for CD Projekt games, according to quest director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz.

V is voiced by Gavin Drea and Cherami Leigh for the male and female versions of V, respectively. CD Projekt Red sought a suitable voice actor for the role of Johnny Silverhand. Keanu Reeves was approached in July 2018 for the role, and noted for his work as Neo in franchise. Reeves' performance was recorded using motion capture technology, a process he had previously used for his performance as Neo in (1999). Although a newcomer to the video game format, Reeves enjoyed the script. Silverhand is featured prominently in the game, with CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwiński recalling in an interview with Bloomberg News that Silverhand's dialogue count is second only to V.

Cyberpunk 2077 was developed using REDengine 4, the fourth iteration of CD Projekt Red's internal game engine. REDengine 3, REDengine 4's predecessor, implemented improvements to terrain and vegetation rendering. To achieve this, regions are streamed from a clipped mipmap (through a method known as clipmapping) in memory. Six clipmaps are created in total; the elevation, control map, and color clipmaps are streamed, while the vertical error, normal, and terrain shadow clipmaps are generated at runtime. In addition, a technique known as tessellation is used, where polygons are divided. In particular, polygon triangulation is used, where data is tessellated into triangles. The error maps are downsampled prior to hardware tessellation. This avoids costly computation, as large areas with high levels of tessellation aren't rendered. Furthermore, REDengine3 employs a radical approach to texturing; textures are painted using two textures: a background texture and an overlay texture. For slopes, the slope angle is computed and compared against a threshold value. Creating a thick cover on slopes was made possible through boosting the overlay texture when the vertex normal looked up; however, this presented complications in ground features, such as cobblestones, where improper distribution was applied. To address this, damping was added, along with blend sharpening. These measures created an ultimately low memory footprint. Other advancements made by REDengine 3 include refined animations, volumetric effects allowing for advanced rendering of particle effects, such as clouds, dynamic physics, and an advanced dialogue mimic system. These improvements allowed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to have a more immersive open-world.

Although Cyberpunk 2077 was initially developed using REDengine 3 as far back as 2013, CD Projekt Red developed REDengine 4 after facing difficulty developing the game, which used a first-person perspective, a departure from the third-person perspective CD Projekt had developed in for earlier iterations of REDengine. REDengine 4 was developed using a US$7 million grant from the Polish government. Nearly every aspect of REDengine was changed as a result, including the particle effects editor. CD Projekt Red continued to work on REDengine throughout Cyberpunk 2077' s development cycle, and as late as 2017. Cyberpunk 2077 is the final game to use REDengine, as future games from CD Projekt Red will instead be developed using Unreal Engine 5.

REDengine 4 implemented various lighting adjustments to create a more realistic world, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing through DirectX, global illumination, diffuse illumination, and ambient occlusion. These features are not present on the console versions of the game. Other features include physically based rendering-an improvement over REDengine 3, screen space reflections, and pin sharp reflections, although the player's character is omitted from the bounding volume hierarchy structure generated ray traced reflections. The player's character does appear, however, in render to texture objects, such as mirrors. Improvements to shadows include cascaded shadow maps, screen space shadows, and ray traced shadows with contact hardening, while improvements to character rendering include subsurface scattering and realistic skin shading. These features introduced computational complexity, testing older consoles, such as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Cyberpunk 2077 uses vertical asset streaming, or culling, a rendering technique that omits objects below and above the player's field of view. This technique saves memory.

During the development of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red partnered with several companies. These companies include Vancouver-based studio Digital Scapes to create additional tools, multinational technology company Nvidia to implement real-time ray tracing, developer QLOC for quality assurance. In addition, artificial intelligence company Jali Research helped CD Projekt Red implement lip syncing for all ten localizations through procedural generation.

CD Projekt Red used a first-person perspective to immerse the player further in the world and hone in on the megacorporation motif. To seamlessly blend cutscenes with gameplay, CD Projekt Red decided to frame cutscenes in first-person, including the sex scenes, with limited exceptions. Players can, however, drive in third-person, and the player's character is visible in areas such as mirrors and security cameras. The decision by game director Adam Badowski to include nudity was tactfully planned, with Badowski stating, "Nudity is important for us because of one reason. This is cyberpunk, so people augment their body. So the body is no longer sacrum [sacred]; it's profanum [profane]", expanding upon transhumanist beliefs.

The quest team took several changes in comparison to the quest system in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015). Game logic was implemented to allow for players to undertake quests in seemingly random orders while remaining coherent, while doubling down on The Witcher 3' philosophy of a "quest twist". To reuse the stories written during the game's development, unused parts from the main story were turned into side quests.

When designing Night City, the art design team at CD Projekt Red took multiple sources of inspiration. German industrial designer Dieter Rams and American neo-futurist concept artist Syd Mead inspired the team, who used Rams' elegance to juxtapose the low-class neighborhoods in Night City and Mead's vibrant colors and materialism to create the demeanor of Night City, in what the team called " kitsch". Building these environments took the team eight years. To create a cyberpunk look for Night City, the team incorporated retro and futuristic elements. To accomplish this, the team looked at dilapidated or old-fashioned buildings-aspects of a familiar reality-with futurism. "For example, you could have a run down building with an old wooden door, but an LED light might be attached to that door, which could be a part of a high-tech security system," Hiroshi Sakakibara, Environment City Coordinator at CD Projekt Red, said during a Cyberpunk 2077 livestream at Tokyo Game Show 2020. A key source of inspiration for the team was Blade Runner (1982), which Sakakibara referred to as the " Bible of all cyberpunk". Other sources of inspiration for the team include the manga and anime series Ghost in the Shell, and other video games such as System Shock (1994) and the first part of (2000). To design the buildings in Night City, the team consulted with urban planners and drew upon the themes of Brutalist architecture. The game's yellow-themed design serves as the antithesis to typical neon art. The designs of Marcello Gandini helped shape the appearance of many of the cars in the game. A motorbike akin to the one in the Akira manga and anime film appears in the game, as well as a car inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

To develop the world building in Night City, the team used four distinct visual styles-austere Entropism, colorful Kitsch, imposing Neomilitarism, and opulent Neokitsch-to explain what happened to the world prior to the events of the game. Bulky cars and unappealing buildings represent Entropism, an architectural style that came about through necessity. In Entropism, practicality is valued more than aesthetics. As the economy recovered, the vibrant style of Kitsch gained traction. The style of Kitsch was countered with Neomilitarism, an ascetic movement where the rise of corporations undid many of the stylistic decisions made in Entropism. Finally, Neokitsch incorporated the classist systems in Neomilitarism with the vibrance of Entropism. In Neokitsch, the rich use scarce materials, such as wood and marble, to construct their buildings, and wear clothes from animals. Night City features six districts, each with a unique gusto. Pacifica, for instance, was a prosperous vacation destination until an economic crisis hit, leaving the Haitian community to form a civilization around the buildings.

The team used the digital compositing software Nuke to design Night City. A challenge for the team was creating a global illumination system that would cast a variety of light sources on narrow streets. Nuke was used to analytically reference the lighting in REDengine with Nuke. In contrast to most other video games, which use tone-mapping, Cyberpunk 2077 uses a classic film LUT. In addition, Nuke was used to design the game's user interface and splash screen.

Multiple licensed artists contributed to Cyberpunk 2077' soundtrack. Hip hop duo Run the Jewels, composed of rappers El-P and Killer Mike, wrote "No Save Point" for the game's soundtrack-a track that vividly critiques the socioeconomic state of Night City. The song is featured in the game and performed by El-P and Killer Mike as "Yankee and the Brave", a reference to the duo's fourth studio album, (2020). Other contributors include Canadian musician Grimes (as Lizzy Wizzy), Swedish band Refused (as Samurai), American rapper ASAP Rocky, English musician Gazelle Twin (as Trash Generation), and American musician Ilan Rubin, among others.

" I Really Want to Stay at Your House" is a song by British singer Rosa Walton written for the game. Featured in the fictional radio station 98.7 Body Heat Radio, the song was included by Lakeshore Records on the soundtrack album Cyberpunk 2077: Radio, Vol. 2 (Original Soundtrack), which was released on 18 December 2020. The song would later on go viral in 2022 after being utilised heavily in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and chart in the United Kingdom at number 68.

Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in May 2012. Trailers for the game were released in January 2013, at E3 2018, and at E3 2019. The game was initially confirmed for Windows, with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One announced at E3 2018. Stadia was announced in August 2019.

At E3 2019, an initial release date of 16 April 2020 was announced. This was delayed to 17 September, then 19 November, and finally 10 December. The developers received death threats over the last delay. The final delay was decided suddenly, with discussions commencing a day before the initial announcement. Due to Polish law, CD Projekt was not allowed to inform every member of the development team due to its large size; around ninety percent were not informed until the last minute. Rockfish Game's Everspace 2's early access release and an expansion to Grinding Gear Games's Path of Exile, scheduled to be released in December 2020, were delayed until the following month in order to avoid competing with Cyberpunk 2077's release.

With E3 2020 cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, CD Projekt's online event Night City Wire showed additional trailers, more gameplay, and making-of footage. Next-generation ports for Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 were initially scheduled for release in 2021, but were delayed in October 2021, before eventually releasing on 15 February 2022. Owners of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions were able to freely download the game on their respective next-generation models. The delayed standalone multiplayer was announced to launch after 2021.

As with The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3, both Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Bandai Namco Entertainment served as physical distributors in North America and Central Europe, Australia, and New Zealand respectively. Spike Chunsoft published the physical PlayStation 4 copies in Japan.

The versions of Cyberpunk 2077 released in Japan and China were subject to a reduction in the amount of nudity and gore portrayed in order to meet rating agency requirements and censorship laws. A datamine of the game's source code by hackers in February 2021 revealed that content flagged for censorship in China was tagged under " Winnie the Pooh", a reference to an internet meme in which Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping was compared to the titular character.

Funko Pops were obtainable starting 16 April 2020. CD Projekt Red held a cosplay competition from June 2019 to October 2020. A card game created alongside publisher CMON Limited, Cyberpunk2077- Afterlife: The Card Game, was slated for 2020 but has yet to be released; no updating announcements have been made and the card game's future remains uncertain. McFarlane Toys signed a three-year agreement to manufacture action figures. The Cyberpunk2077-themed Xbox One X, which includes a digital copy and downloadable content, became the final limited edition of that console. Designed with the same aesthetic were video cards, gaming chairs, energy drinks, sneakers, smartphones exclusive to China, and peripherals. From May 2020, advertising company Agora Group had newspapers, online services, and radio channels doing promotion in Poland. Their subsidiaries carried out publicity outdoors and in movie theatres, using established brands to disseminate information about the game.

A "Collector's Edition" consisting of a custom box, steelbook case, figurine depicting a male V, hardcover artbook, metal pin set and keychain, A Visitor's Guide to Night City, embroidered patches, world compendium, Night City postcards and map, and stickers was released along with the game. The standard edition also contains the compendium, postcards, map, and stickers. Digital items that come with every copy are the soundtrack, art booklet, Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook, wallpapers, and Cyberpunk2077: Your Voice comic. Purchases through CD Projekt's subsidiary GOG.com include the digital comic Cyberpunk2077: Big City Dreams.

Prior to the announcement of the game's only planned expansion, Phantom Liberty, CD Projekt Red released 18 different DLCs for the game which added cosmetics and additional gameplay content. One of the DLCs released included content from the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime.

On 6 September 2022, CD Projekt Red confirmed that Phantom Liberty, would be released for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5 in 2023. It is the only planned expansion for the game, with Reeves reprising his role of Johnny Silverhand. On 16 November 2022, it was confirmed that Phantom Liberty will be a paid expansion pack, akin to expansions Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone. A trailer for Phantom Liberty was released during The Game Awards 2022 which revealed Idris Elba had joined the project. A release date of 26 September 2023 for the Phantom Liberty expansion was revealed during the 2023 Xbox showcase as part of the Summer Game Fest, alongside another trailer and an announcement of the new additions coming to the expansion, amongst them interactive car chases with vehicular combat, overhauled level and progression systems, and equipped cyberware now being able to send the player's character into a "cyberpsycho" state. Pre-orders of Phantom Liberty grant the player a bonus in-game vehicle. Ahead of the release of Phantom Liberty, CD Projekt released a major title update titled Update 2.0 on 21 September for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, which introduces the features that were announced alongside Phantom Liberty.

On 5 December 2022, CD Projekt Red confirmed a "Game of the Year" edition of Cyberpunk 2077 will be released after Phantom Liberty; both are slated for a 2023 release. CD Projekt Red president Adam Kiciński commented that "it's the natural order of things", mentioning that after their previous title The Witcher 3 received the story expansions Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone, the firm released a "Game of the Year" edition of the title, combining all released DLC, and expects the same to happen with Cyberpunk 2077. A physical release of the game for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, which includes Phantom Liberty, was announced on 21 November 2023. Players on PC could purchase this version digitally, and PlayStation 5 releases come with a digital code instead of a disc. This release, titled Ultimate Edition, is set for release on 5 December 2023.

In October 2023, CD Projekt Red would reveal that they have spent over $120 million on Cyberpunk 2077 since launch, accounting for updates, bug fixes and development/marketing of Phantom Liberty (it costing about $84 million). According to a report from Kotaku, the base game cost $174 million to develop and $142 million to market. The total cost of the game is now reportedly over $436 million, making it the second-most expensive video game to develop (behind Star Citizen).

The World of Cyberpunk2077, a 192-page art book, was published by Dark Horse Books on 29 July 2020.

On 9 September, Dark Horse Comics brought out the first issue of a comic book series called Cyberpunk 2077: Trauma Team with writer Cullen Bunn and illustrator Miguel Valderrama. A number of other comic series in the world of Cyberpunk 2077 have also been published by Dark Horse Comics, including Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams (2022), and Cyberpunk 2077: Blackout (2022).

, an anime spin-off collaboration co-produced by CD Projekt Red and Studio Trigger, premiered on 13 September 2022 on Netflix.

The game was highly anticipated before its release. It won over one hundred awards at E3 2018, including Best Game, Best Xbox One Game, Best PC Game, Best RPG, and People's Choice at , Best Role-Playing Game and Game of the Show at Game Informer, Best of E3 at , and Game of the Show at GamesRadar+. The second trailer was considered one of the best at the expo, although writer William Gibson, credited with pioneering the cyberpunk subgenre, described it as " skinned-over with a generic 80s retro-future". Gibson later responded more positively to the first gameplay demo. The first-person perspective, in contrast with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's third-person, was subject to criticism. Cyberpunk2077 was the most widely discussed game of E3 2019, where it was presented awards for Best of E3 at GamesRadar+, PC Gamer, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and Ars Technica, and Best Game, People's Choice, Best PS4 Game, Best Xbox One Game, Best PC Game, and Best RPG at IGN. The third trailer was lauded with emphasis on Reeves' reveal.

Liana Ruppert, a journalist for Game Informer who has photosensitive epilepsy, experienced a grand mal seizure while reviewing the game days before its release. The seizure was triggered by the game's "braindance" sequence, which contains red and white flashing lights that reportedly resemble the patterns produced by medical devices used to intentionally trigger seizures. In response, CD Projekt Red made a public statement and reached out to Ruppert. The company then released a patch to add a warning, and issued a later patch on 11 December to reduce the risk of inducing epileptic symptoms.

Prior to the release of the game, CD Projekt Red provided review copies of Cyberpunk to several major outlets. CD Projekt Red issued strict review embargo terms on these review copies, requiring reviewers to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDA) and only allowing for footage provided by the company to be shown in reviews; according to Wired Magazine (which did not receive a reviewer copy), violating the NDA could cost around $27,000 per violation. Concern also arose over the fact review copies were issued for the PC version of the game, ensuring that all pre-release reviews related to the PC version of the game, excluding consoles. As a result, this eroded trust from some consumers.

The PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series releases of Cyberpunk 2077 received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game received "mixed or average" reviews.

Critics praised the quality of the story as well as the depth and expansiveness of side quests, immersive atmosphere of the world, visual quality, and freshness of the cyberpunk setting. The game's systems such as crafting, driving mechanics, and combat received a mixed response. Some critics, while acknowledging the game's many strengths, nonetheless criticised its shallow portrayal of the cyberpunk genre, and also described its portrayal of related themes such as anti-capitalism and anarchism as ironic. Others took issue with the portrayal of transgender people, who they felt were fetishized by in-game material but were not given any meaningful role in the narrative.

On launch day, the game exceeded 1 million concurrent viewers on Twitch.

Along with several post-release patches, following the release of the animated series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix in September 2022, the game's player count on PC boosted to levels last seen with the game's initial release. The million-plus daily player count continued for at least four weeks following the release of Edgerunners.

The release of Cyberpunk 2077 was a high-profile event and was considered a disastrous launch as a result of the game suffering from numerous bugs and performance issues, particularly on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions. The Guardian called the release "a shambles", while The New York Times said it was among the most conspicuous disasters in the industry's history, with CD Projekt Red prominently failing to meet expectations for what was anticipated to be the biggest game release of the year. Other gaming industry commentators have described the post-launch reception of Cyberpunk 2077 as a fall from grace for CD Projekt Red, who had previously enjoyed a fiercely pro-consumer reputation.

Some of the initial reviews that had been based only on the PC version of the game were later updated to add a caveat about the notable difference in performance between this version and its console releases. Because of the game's performance on consoles, CD Projekt issued an apology, particularly for their pre-release secrecy regarding these versions, concluding that unsatisfied consumers could opt for refunds. This was initially followed by multiple reports of players unable to get said refund. CD Projekt Red later stated that they had no specific deals in place with either Microsoft or Sony to facilitate such an action; refunds are dealt with according to standard refund policies. On 17 December 2020, Sony announced that it would offer refunds to customers who had purchased Cyberpunk 2077 through the PlayStation Store and removed it from the store "until further notice"; once returned to the store in June 2021, the PlayStation Store warned users that "Users continue to experience performance issues with this game. Purchase for use on PS4 systems is not recommended." The Xbox One version of the game remained available for purchase from the online Microsoft store, albeit with a warning about the game's performance issues. Players who bought the game through the Microsoft store were also offered refunds. In the US, GameStop accepted returns of boxed versions of the game even if the box was opened, an exception to the store's usual refund policy.

Although the game's reviews were largely positive, its aggregate score was thought to be disappointing by analysts. CD Projekt SA stock fell by up to 9.4% after the publication of Metacritic's reviews. The reviews aggregation OpenCritic criticised CD Projekt Red for deliberately attempting to misrepresent the game, and not delivering review copies for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, knowing it would receive negative reviews. A class-action lawsuit representing those making investments in CD Projekt during 2020 was filed on 24 December 2020 in California, asserting that the company made fraudulent claims to the state of Cyberpunk 2077 as to mislead those investors; a second similar class-action suit had also been filed by January 2021. By May 2021, four separate lawsuits against CD Projekt had been filed over Cyberpunk 2077, and had been subsequently merged into one common action. CD Projekt proposed a settlement with the investors in December 2021, providing US$1.85 million to the group as part of the terms which was approved by a judge in January 2023. Poland's Office of Competition and Consumer Protection began an investigation of the game in January 2021, asking CD Projekt for an "explanation regarding problems with the game and actions taken by them". Having previously asked its employees to work 6-day weeks for several final months of the development of the game, the company ditched plans to tie developers' bonuses to review scores, choosing instead to pay out the full bonus regardless.

Jason Schreier of Bloomberg News said that, based on discussions with CD Projekt developers, a major reason for the poor performance of Cyberpunk 2077 on release was underestimating the effort that would be needed. While more than twice as many developers were brought on board to help with the game compared to The Witcher 3, CD Projekt had only expected the same amount of time to complete the game, so that the bulk of development towards the game only began in late 2016. The expanded scope of Cyberpunk 2077 including the game's new engine had created difficulties, and while there were more developers, there was less organization of their various functions that further hampered the development, according to Schreier's report. Many developers urged management to hold off on the game's release. Co-CEO Marcin Iwiński issued an open message to players on 13 January 2021, apologizing for the state of the game and the company's plans to correct it. Iwiński stated that the company "underestimated the risk" in bringing a game optimized to run on personal computers over to consoles, particularly the older Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles. He specifically faulted the in-game streaming engine that was used to load in assets from storage on the fly as the player moved through the game, which was scaled back to work on the older consoles. While they had tested these versions as they approached release, they had not seen the same issues that players had reported in the released version. He affirmed that the developers were not responsible for the release state of the game, but instead this was a choice made by himself and the other management of the company. Besides working to issue refunds and bring the game to a state to return it to the PlayStation Store, Iwiński outlined a year-long path that will involve multiple patches to bring the older consoles' versions to better performance and then looking to optimizing the game for newer consoles, prior to any further additional content development.

Despite the rampant technical issues that were prevalent during its initial release that affected the game's sales, Cyberpunk 2077 saw an increase in the number of units sold during the year 2022 of up to 18%, with 94% of the sales being digital. This increase was partially attributed to the release of the Netflix anime series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which garnered positive reviews from both critics and fans, and the concurrent release of a game update which added material from the series in the form of multiple items. CD Projekt Red recognized the success of Edgerunners having driven sales of Cyberpunk 2077 by stating that "a significant increase in the amount of the Group's Sales in the third quarter of 2022 in relation to the reference period was mainly due to a good reception of the Cyberpunk Edgerunner update 1.6 which preceded the release on Netflix of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime series." The series would again be referenced in the Cyberpunk 2.0 update that came alongside the Phantom Liberty downloadable content.

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Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
Phantom Liberty received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, while the Xbox Series X/S version received "universal acclaim", according to review aggregator website Metacritic.

Cyberpunk 2077 received eight million pre-orders on all platforms, of which 74% were digital, and it received more pre-orders than The Witcher3: Wild Hunt; one third of PC sales were through GOG.com. It was a best-seller on Steam in China. CD Projekt Red has stated that digital preorders for the title alone recouped the game's production cost as well as the game's 2020 marketing cost. According to a CD Projekt investors call, sales saw a drastic decline four days after release owing to the technical issues present. After the launch, analyst estimations for sales over 12 months fell from 30 million to 25.6 million.

Within twelve hours after its release, the game had over one million concurrent players on Steam. In Japan, the PlayStation 4 version of Cyberpunk 2077 sold an estimated 104,600 physical units during its debut week, making it the second best-selling retail game of the week in the country. The game passed 13 million units sold in December 2020. It had the biggest digital game launch of all time, selling 10.2 million digital units and grossed $609 million in digital sales by 31 December 2020. By September 2022, the game had sold over 20 million copies units. As of October 2023, it has sold over 25 million units, and Phantom Liberty has sold 3 million units in a week after release. By November 2023, Phantom Liberty had sold 4.3 million units.

A sequel, codenamed "Project Orion", was announced in October 2022. It will be developed by CD Projekt North America, which has studios in both Vancouver and Boston. Several core team members working on Cyberpunk 2077 will be relocated to Boston to work on the game. The game's development will begin following the release of Phantom Liberty. The next installment is rumored to use Unreal Engine 5 due to the new technology partnership between Epic Games and CD Projekt Red. In June 2023, the director of Phantom Liberty expansion and upcoming sequel, Gabe Amatangelo confirmed the use of Unreal Engine in Cyberpunk 2077's sequel.

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Cyberpunk 2077 is a 2020 action role-playing video game developed by CD Projekt Red and published by CD Projekt, based on video game designer Mike Pondsmith's game series.

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Blade Runner 2049 is a 2017 American neo-noir science fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green. A sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner, the film stars Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, with Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Dave Bautista, and Jared Leto in supporting roles. Ford and Edward James Olmos reprise their roles from the original film. Gosling plays K, a Nexus-9 replicant "blade runner" who uncovers a secret that threatens to destabilize society and the course of civilization.

Ideas for a Blade Runner sequel were first proposed in the 1990s, but licensing issues stalled their development. Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson obtained the film rights from Bud Yorkin. Ridley Scott stepped down as the film's initial director and worked as an executive producer, while Villeneuve was later appointed to direct. Blade Runner 2049 was financed through a partnership between Alcon Entertainment and Sony Pictures, as well as a Hungarian government-funded tax rebate. Warner Bros., who had distributed its predecessor, released the film on behalf of Alcon in North America, while Sony handled distribution in international markets. Principal photography took place mostly at two soundstages in Budapest over four months from July to November 2016.

Blade Runner 2049 premiered in Los Angeles on October 3, 2017, and was released in the United States on October 6, 2017. The film received acclaim from critics, who praised multiple aspects including cast performances, directing, cinematography, and faithfulness to the original film. It grossed $267.5million worldwide against a production budget of $150-185million for a reported loss of $80 million. Blade Runner 2049 received many accolades, including Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects out of five nominations, and eight British Academy Film Awards nominations, winning for Best Cinematography and Best Special Visual Effects. A sequel television series, Blade Runner 2099, is in development at Amazon Studios, with Scott set to return as executive producer.

In 2049, 30 years after the events of Blade Runner, bioengineered humans known as replicants are slaves. K (short for serial number, KD6-3.7), a Nexus-9 replicant, works for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as a "blade runner", an officer who hunts and "retires" (kills) rogue replicants. After retiring replicant Sapper Morton he finds a box buried under a tree at Morton's farm, containing the remains of a female replicant who died during a caesarean section, demonstrating that replicants can reproduce biologically, previously thought impossible. K's superior, Lt. Joshi, fears this knowledge could lead to war between humans and replicants and orders K to retire the replicant child.

K visits the Wallace Corporation, successor to the defunct Tyrell Corporation in the manufacture of replicants, where DNA archives identify the deceased female as Rachael, an experimental replicant. K learns of Rachael's romantic ties with former blade runner Rick Deckard. CEO Niander Wallace wants the secret to replicant reproduction to expand interstellar colonization. He sends his replicant enforcer Luv to follow K.

At Morton's farm, K finds 6.10.21 carved into the tree trunk and recognizes it from a childhood memory of a wooden toy horse. Because replicant memories are artificial, K's holographic A.I. girlfriend Joi believes this is evidence that K was born, not created. He discovers in LAPD records two children born on that date with identical DNA aside from the sex chromosome, but only the boy is listed as alive. K tracks the child to an orphanage but the records from that year are missing. K recognizes the orphanage from his memories and finds the toy horse where he remembers hiding it.

Replicant memory designer Dr. Ana Stelline confirms that his memory of the orphanage is not artificial, leading K to conclude he is Rachael's son. At LAPD headquarters K implies to Joshi that he has killed the replicant child. He fails a baseline test marking him as rogue. Joshi gives him 48 hours to pass the test or he will be 'retired'. Joi hires replicant prostitute Mariette as a surrogate for Joi to have sex with K. Mariette is part of the replicant freedom movement and leaves a tracker on K. Analysis of the toy horse leads K to the ruins of Las Vegas. He finds Deckard, who tells him that he is the father of Rachael's child and scrambled the birth records to protect the child's identity; Deckard left the child in the custody of the replicant freedom movement.

Luv kills Joshi and tracks K to Las Vegas. She kidnaps Deckard, destroys Joi, and leaves K to die. Using Mariette's tracker, the replicant freedom movement rescues K. When their leader, Freysa, tells him that Rachael's child was a girl, K understands that he is not Rachael's child, deduces that Stelline is her daughter and that the toy horse memory is hers, one she implanted in replicants whose memories she designed. To prevent Deckard leading Wallace to Stelline or the freedom movement, Freysa asks K to kill Deckard.

Luv takes Deckard to meet Wallace, who offers Deckard a duplicate Rachael in exchange for revealing what he knows. Deckard refuses, and Luv kills the duplicate. As Luv transports Deckard to be interrogated, K intercedes and tries to rescue Deckard. He fights and drowns Luv but is mortally wounded. He stages Deckard's death to protect him from Wallace and the replicant freedom movement before taking Deckard to Stelline's office and handing him her toy horse. As K lies on the steps looking up at the falling snow, Deckard enters the building and meets his daughter for the first time.

Archival footage, audio, and stills of Sean Young from the original film are used to represent both her original character of Rachael and a duplicate of the character created by Niander Wallace. Young's likeness was digitally superimposed onto Loren Peta, who was coached by Young on how to recreate her performance from the first film. The voice of the replicant was created with the use of a sound-alike actress to Young. Young was credited for her work.

Director Denis Villeneuve credits Blade Runner for igniting his passion for filmmaking.

From the 1990s, licensing disputes over Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had deterred the creation of sequels to the science fiction drama Blade Runner (1982). Director Ridley Scott conceived two ultimately unrealized projects vaguely connected to the Blade Runner canon in the interim. Scott's second project, a collaboration with his son Luke and younger brother Tony titled Purefold, had been imagined as an episodic webseries examining conceptions of empathy.

Nearly three decades after the film's release, Alcon Entertainment co-founders Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson purchased the intellectual property from producer Bud Yorkin. The terms of Alcon's acquisition prohibited the remake of the original Blade Runner film, but entitled the company rights to syndication, franchising, and derivative media such as prequels and sequels. No longer satisfied with the profits of their smaller-budget features, and with investor funding scarce, Kosove and Johnson sought to increase Alcon's output of blockbuster films: "If you don't have repetitive cash flow, which is a fancy way of saying being in the sequel business, you are going to be in trouble eventually." Progress on a new Blade Runner feature soon accelerated when Kosove named Christopher Nolan one of his ideal choices to direct. However, Nolan said he never planned to direct, despite being an admirer of the Blade Runner franchise.

By August 2011, Alcon had announced Ridley Scott's signing as the film's director to the press. The British filmmaker had long desired a sequel to expand upon the subject matter. After securing Scott's services, the studio assigned Michael Green and a returning Hampton Fancher the responsibility for writing the script. Alcon producers provided some insight into their vision but were unsure of how to approach the Blade Runner story, hence they and the normally candid Scott were tight-lipped when questioned further about the sequel's artistic direction in interviews conducted during pre-production. Ultimately, Scott resigned from his duties once his existing commitment to Alien: Covenant (2017) took precedence, and retained partial oversight as an executive producer. He also made significant contributions to the screenplay, albeit in an uncredited role.

Blade Runner 2049 was Alcon's second collaboration with director Denis Villeneuve, who they called for a meeting at a cafe in rural New Mexico to negotiate an offer. They had an existing professional relationship from (2013). Villeneuve credits Blade Runner for inspiring his passion for filmmaking, but hesitated to accept the assignment at first as he feared tarnishing the franchise's legacy. Nevertheless, he liked the screenplay and was assured by Fancher's investment in the project. Villeneuve preserved elements of the original film by modernizing Blade Runner's retrofuturistic onscreen world, which he saw as imperative for an authentic story.

A scene from Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018) set in the Blade Runner universe was excluded from the film's finished cut. Spielberg had sought copyright approval during the filming of Blade Runner 2049, which Alcon producers refused as they feared the explicit reference would affect their commercial prospects, even though Ready Player One was released months later.

Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford promoting the film at the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con

Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling were Blade Runner 2049's first significant casting choices. Gossip about Ford's participation had been circulating in the media since the project's conception, claims which the producers initially denied, having only approached the actor for a part in 2014. Alcon did not publicly announce their signing until the following year. Ford had expressed interest in reprising his role in past interviews and was enthusiastic about the Blade Runner 2049 script. The working conditions on set was another aspect of the production Ford was pleased with, in contrast to the stressful shooting environment endured on Blade Runner. Ford stated the thirty five-year passage of time, plus the synthesis of a new story with Deckard's already-established backstory, lent context necessary to playing his aged character. The only other returning Blade Runner actor, Edward James Olmos, appears in a supporting part which pivots the main story.

The screenwriters tailored K specifically for Gosling, but it was the opportunity to work with Villeneuve and experienced cinematographer Roger Deakins, paired with his faith in the script, that convinced the actor to join Blade Runner 2049 in his first leading role in a blockbuster production. Gosling had developed a reputation for his discriminating film choices; the prospect of working on big-budget franchise sets never enticed him, yet he trusted the filmmakers' instincts, and the thematic complexity of the script further reassured his decision. A longtime Blade Runner fan, the actor remarked that his first viewing experience of the film as a young teenager was profound: "It was one of the first films I had seen where it wasn't clear how I was supposed to feel when it was over. It really makes you question your idea of the hero and the villain, the idea of what it means to be human." Blade Runner 2049 proved challenging for Gosling because of the production's scope.

An actress of national renown in Spain who aspired to break into English-speaking roles, Ana de Armas auditioned several times before landing the film's female lead. After shooting for her first Hollywood film Hands of Stone (2016), de Armas settled in Los Angeles in pursuit of a role that did not typecast her ethnicity. She underwent four months of rigorous speech training to master her English before auditioning. Once the studio commenced production of Blade Runner 2049, the actress said her fitness training provided the necessary mental space to prepare for the intense shooting schedule.

Villeneuve considered David Bowie, one of the franchise's core influences, for the part of Niander Wallace until the musician died months prior to filming. He and the producers subsequently looked at Jared Leto, fresh off filming Suicide Squad (2016), as they felt he exuded Bowie's rockstar sensibility. Leto refrains from naming specific sources that shaped certain aspects of his character's persona; rather the actor cites real-life friends who work in tech as a general influence. Notorious for his unorthodox preparation for roles, Leto continued his unusual practices in Blade Runner 2049 by wearing custom opaque contact lenses to work the set completely blind. Villeneuve recalled his first day shooting with the actor: "He entered the room, and he could not see at all. He was walking with an assistant very slowly. It was like seeing Jesus walking into a temple. Everybody became super silent, and there was a kind of sacred moment. Everyone was in awe. It was so beautiful and powerful-I was moved to tears."

A raft of mostly young actors comprise Blade Runner 2049's supporting cast; David Dastmalchian, Sylvia Hoeks, Carla Juri, Mackenzie Davis, and Barkhad Abdi were lesser-known stars with years of expertise in independent cinema. Among the few exceptions are Dave Bautista, Hiam Abbass, and Lennie James, whose castings were revealed between April and July 2016; and Robin Wright, assigned to one of three major female roles in Blade Runner 2049. Wright's involvement had been rumored for weeks, but was not immediately confirmed by the filmmakers as her commitments to the Netflix series House of Cards momentarily stalled negotiations.

The exterior of the Budapest Stock Exchange's Liberty Square palace, whose interior doubled for Las Vegas in casino-set scenes

The filmmakers embarked on location scouting in April 2016, and principal photography of Blade Runner 2049 commenced that July, lasting four months until November. They first toured London but found no soundstage available for the needs of the production. As a result, Deakins and Villeneuve flew to Hungary for location scouting partly due to Scott's familiarity with the country's network of facilities. They also toured Slovakia to source architectural ideas. Blade Runner 2049's production crew were mostly Hungarian, with some American staff hired to supervise the set. Inserts with Wright and Hoeks were the first scenes filmed on set. Shooting took place mainly at Korda Studios and the Origo Studios backlot in suburban Budapest, where the shoot qualified for a 25% tax rebate on in-state costs from the Hungarian government.

The Alcon-Sony partnership allocated $180million ($90million each) for the budget, rebates notwithstanding. Interior shots of the Budapest Stock Exchange's Liberty Square palace doubled for Las Vegas in casino-set scenes, and abandoned Soviet industrial sites such as the abandoned Inota and Kelenföld power plants were important filming locations that emphasized Blade Runner 2049's dystopian ethos. The Budapest palace was the film's largest set, occupying at least three floors of the building. Filmmakers revised Deckard's capture by Luv into a simple conversational scene after Ford conveyed to Kosove and Johnson his disapproval of the dialogue.

Pitfalls occasionally beset the production. The filmmakers frequently fell behind schedule, and an Origo Studios-employed subcontractor was killed by falling debris when dismantling one of the sets. Gosling's obligation to fulfill a New York City press junket for (2016) exacerbated the unusual circumstances of the shoot; however, his scenes were able to be filmed in time for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Blade Runner 2049 is the third Deakins-Villeneuve collaboration after Prisoners and (2015). Together with production designer Dennis Gassner, the men brainstormed ideas for the film's visual palette as Villeneuve was editing his science fiction drama (2016). The sequences were then storyboarded and left for Deakins and Villeneuve to execute. The two were inspired by the architecture of several global cities to develop a hostile, imposing brutalist style for their fictionalized Los Angeles, among them the appearance of Beijing's cityscape in dense smog, the foothills of southern Spain, Bangladeshi shipyards, and certain mid-twentieth century landmarks in London (such as the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower). For Las Vegas-set scenes, the filmmakers researched intense dust storms in the Sahara, Saudi Arabia and Sydney to replicate the sandy desert ruins Villeneuve sought.

It became apparent to Deakins that Blade Runner 2049 would be one of his biggest undertakings because of the technical demands involved in realizing the onscreen universe. Deakins exercises full artistic control of his shoots, and the extent of his oversight meant a single-camera setup for the set-the British cinematographer rejected a studio line producer's request for a nine unit-camera setup because he firmly believed said technique would yield sloppy camerawork. Rather, he and Villeneuve reprised the practical approach of their previous collaborations to capture the Blade Runner 2049 scenes. They shot the project in 1.55:1 aspect ratio from a single Arri Alexa XT Studio camera with Zeiss Master Prime lenses, assisted with an attached crane arm or a dolly. The filmmakers conducted tests with an Alexa 65 camera but preferred the XT Studio's somewhat grainy image quality, and the choice of lenses corresponded to the scale and lighting specifications of the scenes. For example, close-up character scenes were captured in 32mm lenses, but filmmakers captured sweeping cityscape shots with 14mm and 16mm lenses. Occasionally, Arri Alexa Mini cameras were used to represent views from the spinners, the vehicles used in the film.

Spinner on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles

When Gassner was first approached for Blade Runner 2049, he was called with a request from Villeneuve to observe the shape of passing street sweepers. The designer had known Scott since 1982, when they first collaborated for the Francis Ford Coppola-directed musical One From the Heart. Redesigning the spinners then became one of his initial responsibilities. He and the filmmakers envisioned a harsh, angular design for the spinners, one intended to evoke the sense of technological innovation. It was also up to Gassner to complete most of the Blade Runner 2049 sets so producers could exercise full artistic control of the shoot. Gassner described the process as especially difficult as design elements had to be distinct but lore-faithful, with everything executed under a tight shooting schedule.

Costume designer Renée April produced costumes featuring fake fur, painted cotton disguised as shearling, and breathing masks. April initially researched the fashion styles of the 1960s and 1970s, but elected to research various decades for influence as well as both Eastern and Western culture. When discussing the film, she stated she did not consider it a fashionable one. "I made costumes for the dark, wet, polluted, miserable world that Denis [Villeneuve] created. I had to hold myself back and remove anything too avant-garde or outré because it did not help the story. There were no superhero suits because the world needed to be realistic, and the characters relatable." When April discussed the film with Villeneuve about what direction she should take the costumes, Villeneuve told her "brutal", a similar description he gave to Gassner. "So I took it from there and made it tougher. Also, we did not want to do something science-fiction. We wanted to do it realistic. I did not want costumes with [lots of] zippers and plastic. So my job was to make the characters believable."

Warner Bros. announced in early October 2016 that the film would be titled Blade Runner 2049. Editing commenced in December in Los Angeles, with the intention of having the film be rated R. At the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con, Villeneuve said the film would run for two hours and 32 minutes. An early cut of the film was four hours long, and Villeneuve described this version as "quite strong", but also at times "too self-indulgent". He said he prefers the shorter final version, which is "more elegant", though Ridley Scott has voiced the opinion that it is still too long. Villeneuve said he will not show the four-hour cut to anyone. As with , cinematographer Roger Deakins created his own IMAX master of the film, rather than using the proprietary " DMR" process that IMAX usually uses with films not shot with IMAX cameras.

Rapper-producer El-P said he was asked to compose music for the first Blade Runner 2049 trailer, but his score was "rejected (or ignored)". Jóhann Jóhannsson, who had worked with Villeneuve on , and , was initially announced as composer for the film. Villeneuve and Jóhannsson decided to end the collaboration, however, because Villeneuve thought the film "needed something different", and also that he "needed to go back to something closer to Vangelis's soundtrack" of the first film. Composers Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch joined the project in July 2017. In September, Jóhannsson's agent confirmed that he was no longer involved and was contractually forbidden from commenting. The musical cue during the final scene, "Tears in the Rain", is a call-back to the " Tears in rain" scene from Blade Runner which saw the death of the film's central antagonist Roy Batty. The track is a reimagined version of the original Vangelis work. Additionally, a segment from Sergei Prokofiev's musical composition " Peter and the Wolf" (Russian: Петя и волк) plays whenever the emanator is activated or deactivated.

An advertisement for the film at Birmingham New Street Station, October 2017

Blade Runner 2049 premiered on October 3, 2017, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, although following the 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting, the red carpet events were canceled prior to the screening. It was the opening feature at the Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal the following day. It also was premiered in Switzerland at the Zurich Film Festival on October 4, 2017. Sony Pictures Releasing, which had obtained rights to release the film in overseas territories, was the first to release Blade Runner 2049 in theaters, first in France and Belgium on October 4, 2017, then in other countries on the two following days. The film was released by Warner Bros. in North America on October 6, 2017. Alcon Entertainment partnered with Oculus VR to create and distribute content for the film exclusively for its virtual reality format and launched it alongside the theatrical release of October 6, 2017. That content would later be referred to as Blade Runner: Revelations. Due to the popularity and preference of IMAX in 2D (as opposed to 3D) among filmgoers in North America, the film was shown in IMAX theaters in only 2D domestically, but was screened in 3D formats internationally. Just like , the movie was specially formatted for IMAX at the expanded aspect ratio of 1.9:1. The film is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for "violence, some sexuality, nudity, and language".

Some scenes in the film that featured nudity were censored in Turkey. This decision received criticism from the country's film critics.

Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures jointly released an announcement teaser on December 19, 2016. A selection of excerpts (lasting 15 seconds) were released as a trailer tease on May 5, 2017, in the lead-up to the full trailer, which was released on May 8, 2017. A second trailer was released on July 17, 2017.

Three short films were made to explore events that occur in the 30 years between Blade Runner, which is set in 2019, and Blade Runner 2049:

The film was released on DVD, Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, and 4K Blu-ray on January 16, 2018. It made approximately $29million in US physical home media sales.

Blade Runner 2049 grossed $92.1million in the United States and Canada, and $175.4million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $267.5million, against a production budget between $150-185million. The projected worldwide total the film needed to gross in order to break even was estimated to be around $400million, and in November 2017, The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film was expected to lose the studio as much as $80million. Ridley Scott attributed the film's underperformance to the runtime, saying: "It's slow. Long. Too long. I would have taken out half an hour."

In the United States and Canada, the film was initially projected to gross $43-47million in its opening weekend. In September 2017, a survey from Fandango indicated that the film was one of the most anticipated releases of the season. It made $4million from Thursday night previews, including $800,000 from IMAX theaters, but just $12.6million on its first day, lowering weekend estimates to $32million. It made $11.3million on Saturday and went on to debut to $31.5million, performing below both projections but still finishing first at the box office and marking the biggest openings of Villeneuve and Gosling's careers. The film would hold Gosling's opening weekend record for six years until 2023 when it was overtaken by . Regarding the opening weekend, director Villeneuve said, "It's a mystery. All the indexes and marketing tools they were using predicted that it would be a success. The film was acclaimed by critics. So everyone expected the first weekend's results to be impressive, and they were shocked. They still don't understand."

Deadline Hollywood attributed the film's performance to the 163-minute runtime limiting the number of showtimes theaters could have, lack of appeal to mainstream audiences, and the marketing being vague and relying on nostalgia and established fanbase to carry it. In its second weekend, the film dropped 52.7% to $15.5million, finishing second behind newcomer Happy Death Day ($26million) and dropped another 54% in its third weekend to $7.2million, finishing in 4th behind Boo 2! A Madea Halloween, , and Happy Death Day.

Overseas, the film was expected to debut to an additional $60million, for a worldwide opening of around $100million. It actually made $50.2million internationally, finishing number one in 45 markets, for a global opening of $81.7million. The film made $8million in the United Kingdom, $4.9million in Russia, $1.8million in Brazil, and $3.6million in Australia. It debuted in China on October 27, where it made $7.7million opening weekend, which was considered a disappointment.

Roger Deakins' work on the film received critical acclaim and earned him his first Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

Blade Runner 2049 was well received by the American press, and various US publications included the film in their end-of-2017 lists. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 88% based on 444 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "Visually stunning and narratively satisfying, Blade Runner 2049 deepens and expands its predecessor's story while standing as an impressive filmmaking achievement in its own right." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 81 out of 100 based on 54 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Critics who saw the film before its release were asked by Villeneuve not to reveal certain characters and plot points. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it a 78% overall positive score and a 60% "definite recommend".

Critical reviews compared the sequel favorably to Blade Runner as a worthy successor advancing the franchise mythos, though some were conflicted over the pacing and tonal shifts of the story, and the film drew occasional disapproval from reviewers who felt it lacked the spectacle and dramatic depth of its predecessor. The film's craftsmanship was the main source of praise from journalists, who routinely singled out Villeneuve for his expertise: A. O. Scott of The New York Times viewed Blade Runner 2049 as an introspection of Villeneuve's own sensibilities, the product of a director exuding an "unnerving calm", while Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said the film seemed to employ a similar narrative tone to the director's late period films such as Arrival.

The Villeneuve-Deakins collaboration was noted for the creation of cinematography displaying "the kind of complex artistry one would expect from the profession's top veteran", with Deakins' work described as "bleakly beautiful". Other aspects of Blade Runner 2049, such as the set design, writing, and scoring, were cited among the strengths of the film.

The actors' performances were a principal topic of discussion among critics. Critiques of the dynamic of the cast were positive in the media, and reviewers often distinguished Gosling, Ford, and Wright for further praise. Gosling's work was described as "superb, soulful", and he was considered physically convincing as a replicant in his expression and appearance. Meanwhile, critics from The Hollywood Reporter and from magazine were among those who believed Ford worked a career-best performance. Other journalists, such as Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, viewed the two men as "double dynamite" in conversational scenes, in which the film assumes "a resonance that is both tragic and hopeful".

One particular point of contention in reviews of Blade Runner 2049 was characterization: some critics, for example, saw K's romance with Joi as an idea of unrealized potential because the film explores their relationship only superficially, so Joi never seems to develop into a fleshed-out character. Some criticized the film's depiction of its female characters as being too submissive.

The fate of K in the closing scenes of the film has been a matter of debate; some critics have suggested that his demise is open to interpretation, as it is not explicitly stated in the film that K has died. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, screenwriter Michael Green expressed surprise that K's death had been called into question, referring to the use of the " Tears in rain" musical motif in the final scene.

The question of whether Deckard is a human or a replicant has been an ongoing controversy since the original release of Blade Runner. Ridley Scott has stated that Deckard was a replicant. Others, however, including Harrison Ford, disagree, and feel preserving the ambiguity of Deckard's status important to the film. Blade Runner 2049 does not settle this debate. During various physical struggles, Deckard showed no sign of artificial replicant strength; however, Gaff described Deckard to K as "retired"; and replicant maker Niander Wallace tells Deckard that "You are a wonder to me, Mr. Deckard", and that he might have been "designed" to fall in love with Rachael.

Reviewing the film for , Charlotte Gush was critical of its portrayal of women, who she said were "either prostitutes, holographic housewives" or victims dying brutal deaths. While acknowledging that " misogyny was part of the dystopia" in Scott's 1982 original, she stated that the sequel was "eye-gougingly sexist". Writing for The Guardian, Anna Smith expressed similar concerns, stating that "sexualised images of women dominate the stunning futuristic cityscapes" and questioned whether the film catered heavily to heterosexual men. Sara Stewart of the New York Post entitled her review "You'll love the new Blade Runner-unless you're a woman".

Rachael Kaines of Moviepilot countered that "the gender politics in Blade Runner 2049 are intentional": "The movie is about secondary citizens. Replicants. Orphans. Women. Slaves. Just by depicting these secondary citizens in subjugation doesn't mean that it is supportive of these depictions - they are a condemnation."

Helen Lewis of the New Statesman suggested that the film is "an uneasy feminist parable about controlling the means of reproduction" and that "its villain, Niander Wallace, is consumed by rage that women can do something he cannot":

Fertility is the perfect theme for the dystopia of Blade Runner 2049 because of the western elite anxiety that over-educated, over-liberated women are having fewer children or choosing to opt-out of childbearing altogether. (One in five women is now childless by the age of 45; the rates are higher among women who have been to university.) Feminism is one potential solution to this problem: removing the barriers which make women feel that motherhood is a closing of doors. Another is to take flight and find another exploitable class to replace human females.... Maybe androids don't dream of electric sheep, but some human men certainly dream of electric wombs.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Denis Villeneuve responded that he is very sensitive about his portrayal of women: " Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it's about today. And I'm sorry, but the world is not kind on women."

Quoting from viewer demographics for the film by , Donald Clarke of The Irish Times indicated that female audiences seemed alienated from it, as just 35% of its audience was female.

magazine commented on the controversial aspects of the sex scene-involving K, the holographic Joi and replicant Mariette-calling it a " robo-ménage à trois", and contrasted it with the sex scene between Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson in (2013).

Mackenzie Davis, who portrayed Mariette, argued for the self-awareness of the film's social commentary in an interview with the website Refinery29. Asked how she believed Blade Runner 2049 "differs [from Blade Runner] in its portrayal of women", Davis responded:

I think it's pretty self-aware about a pornographic economy that has reduced the roles of women to sheer consumption. The normalization of women's roles as things to be consumed, there's products that are made, just like there are now, the idea of the semi-sentient sex doll is really in line with what's going on in this Blade Runner universe, about having a thing that fulfills everything you want, but doesn't talk back and can't argue with you, but can be a loving, supporting companion and also fulfill all your sexual needs feels like something that's very contemporary and something the movie is very self-aware about. And then I think that there are female roles in different castes of this society that are able to be more embodied and powerful in conventional ways, and also have cracks in their facade where you see their vulnerabilities. But it seems like this world is so dependent on this caste system of humans perform these roles; replicants perform these roles, human superiors, creators, and those are the ways that women sort of travel between. But there isn't a lot of upward mobility.

Other outlets noted the film's depiction of environmental issues, the impacts of climate change and a wider ecocide. Science fiction author Matthew Kressel told the BBC that he thought "the environmental collapse the film so vividly depicts is not too far off from where we are today". Stills from the film were also compared to air pollution in Beijing and wildfire smoke in San Francisco.

Blade Runner 2049 received numerous awards and nominations. At the 90th Academy Awards, it was nominated for five awards, winning Best Cinematography for Deakins, and Best Visual Effects for John Nelson, Gerd Nefzer, Paul Lambert, and Richard R. Hoover. At the 71st British Academy Film Awards, it received eight nominations, including Best Director, and won for Best Cinematography and Best Special Visual Effects. At the 23rd Critics' Choice Awards, the film was nominated for seven awards, winning for Best Cinematography.

During the promotional tour for the 2015 film The Martian, Scott expressed interest in making additional Blade Runner films. In October 2017, Villeneuve said he expected a third film would be made if 2049 was successful. Fancher, who wrote both films, said he was considering reviving an old story idea involving Deckard traveling to another country. Ford has said he would be open to returning if he liked the script. In January 2018, Scott stated that he had "another [story] ready to evolve and be developed, [that] there is certainly one to be done for sure", referring to a third Blade Runner film.

In January 2020, Villeneuve expressed interest in "revisit[ing] this universe in a different way," making "something disconnected from both other movies," as opposed to a direct sequel.

In November 2021, Scott announced that a Blade Runner TV series was in the works. In February 2022, it was announced that the series, Blade Runner 2099, was in development at Alcon Entertainment, Sony Pictures Television and Amazon Studios. It will be set fifty years after the events of 2049. Scott will serve as executive producer and potentially direct the series, while Silka Luisa will serve as showrunner. On October 12, 2022, an apparent official approval to actually make a Blade Runner 2099 TV series was reported.

In April 2023, Joe Roberts writing for Slash Films announced progress for the planned filming and 2024 release of the limited series stating: "We then learned, via BBC, that the show would film in Ireland, with Northern Ireland Screen chief executive Richard Williams confirming a spring 2023 start date. If that turns out to be the case, don't expect the series to make it to Prime Video in 2023. Filming will no doubt take months and if post-production is anything like you might expect on a big-budget sci-fi outing, we should prepare for "Blade Runner 2099" to debut sometime in 2024.

In June 2023, Annapurna Interactive announced Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth was in development. It is to be set before the events of the movie and after the anime Blade Runner: Black Lotus.

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Blade Runner 2049 is a 2017 American neo-noir science fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green. A sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner , the film stars Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, with Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Dave Bautista, and Jared Leto in supporting roles.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984) is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian state in the novel on the Soviet Union in the era of Stalinism, and Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.

The story takes place in an imagined future in an unspecified year believed to be 1984, when much of the world is in perpetual war. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, which is led by Big Brother, a dictatorial leader supported by an intense cult of personality manufactured by the Party's Thought Police. The Party engages in omnipresent government surveillance and, through the Ministry of Truth, historical negationism and constant propaganda to persecute individuality and independent thinking.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent mid-level worker at the Ministry of Truth who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. Smith keeps a forbidden diary. He begins a relationship with a colleague, Julia, and they learn about a shadowy resistance group called the Brotherhood. However, their contact within the Brotherhood turns out to be a Party agent, and Smith and Julia are arrested. He is subjected to months of psychological manipulation and torture by the Ministry of Love and is released once he has come to love Big Brother.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. It also popularised the term " Orwellian" as an adjective, with many terms used in the novel entering common usage, including "Big Brother", " doublethink", "Thought Police", " thoughtcrime", " Newspeak", and " 2 + 2 = 5". Parallels have been drawn between the novel's subject matter and real life instances of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression among other themes. Orwell described his book as a " satire", and a display of the "perversions to which a centralised economy is liable," while also stating he believed "that something resembling it could arrive." included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005, and it was placed on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list, reaching number 13 on the editors' list and number 6 on the readers' list. In 2003, it was listed at number eight on The Big Read survey by the BBC.

The Orwell Archive at University College London contains undated notes about ideas that evolved into Nineteen Eighty-Four. The notebooks have been deemed "unlikely to have been completed later than January 1944", and "there is a strong suspicion that some of the material in them dates back to the early part of the war".

In one 1948 letter, Orwell claims to have "first thought of [the book] in 1943", while in another he says he thought of it in 1944 and cites 1943's Tehran Conference as inspiration: "What it is really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into 'Zones of Influence' (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran Conference), and in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism". Orwell had toured Austria in May 1945 and observed manoeuvering he thought would likely lead to separate Soviet and Allied Zones of Occupation.

In January 1944, literature professor Gleb Struve introduced Orwell to Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 dystopian novel . In his response Orwell expressed an interest in the genre, and informed Struve that he had begun writing ideas for one of his own, "that may get written sooner or later." In 1946, Orwell wrote about the 1931 dystopian novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley in his article "Freedom and Happiness" for the Tribune, and noted similarities to We. By this time Orwell had scored a critical and commercial hit with his 1945 political satire Animal Farm, which raised his profile. For a follow-up he decided to produce a dystopian work of his own.

In a June 1944 meeting with Fredric Warburg, co-founder of his British publisher Secker & Warburg, shortly before the release of Animal Farm, Orwell announced that he had written the first 12 pages of his new novel. He could only earn a living from journalism, however, and predicted the book would not see a release before 1947. Progress was slow going; by the end of September 1945 Orwell had written some 50 pages. Orwell became disenchanted with the restrictions and pressures involved with journalism and grew to detest city life in London. His health also suffered, with the harsh winter worsening his case of bronchiectasis and a lesion in one lung.

The novel was completed at Barnhill, Jura.

In May 1946, Orwell arrived on the Scottish island of Jura. He had wanted to retreat to a Hebridean island for several years, to which David Astor recommended he stay at Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the island that his family owned. Barnhill had no electricity or hot water, but it was here where Orwell intermittently drafted and finished Nineteen Eighty-Four. His first stay lasted until October 1946, during which time he made little progress on the few already completed pages and at one point, did no work on it for three months. After spending the winter in London, Orwell returned to Jura; in May 1947 he reported to Warburg that despite progress being slow and difficult, he was roughly a third of the way through. He sent his "ghastly mess" of a first draft manuscript to London where Miranda Christen volunteered to type a clean version. Orwell's health took a turn in September, however, and he was confined to bed with inflammation of the lungs. He lost almost two stone (28 pounds or 12.7 kg) in weight and had recurring night sweats, but he decided not to see a doctor and continued writing. On 7 November 1947, he completed the first draft in bed and subsequently travelled to East Kilbride near Glasgow for medical treatment at Hairmyres Hospital, where a specialist confirmed a chronic and infectious case of tuberculosis.

Orwell was discharged in the summer of 1948, after which he returned to Jura and produced a full second draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he finished in November. He asked Warburg to have someone come to Barnhill and retype the manuscript, which was so untidy that the task was only considered possible if Orwell was present, as only he could understand it. The previous volunteer had left the country and no other could be found at short notice, so an impatient Orwell retyped it himself at a rate of roughly 4,000 words a day during bouts of fever and bloody coughing fits. On 4 December 1948, Orwell sent the finished manuscript to Secker & Warburg and left Barnhill for good in January 1949. He recovered at a sanitarium in the Cotswolds.

Shortly before completion of the second draft, Orwell hesitated between two titles for the novel: The Last Man in Europe, an early title, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Warburg suggested the latter, which he took to be a more commercially viable choice. There has been a theory - doubted by Dorian Lynskey (author of a 2019 book about Nineteen Eighty-Four) - that 1984 was chosen simply as an inversion of the year 1948, the year in which it was being completed. Lynskey says the idea was "first suggested by Orwell's US publisher", and it was also mentioned by Christopher Hitchens in his introduction to the 2003 edition of Animal Farm and 1984, which also notes that the date was meant to give "an immediacy and urgency to the menace of totalitarian rule". However, Lynskey does not believe the inversion theory:

This idea ... seems far too cute for such a serious book. ... Scholars have raised other possibilities. [His wife] Eileen wrote a poem for her old school's centenary called 'End of the Century: 1984.' G. K. Chesterton's 1904 political satire The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which mocks the art of prophecy, opens in 1984. The year is also a significant date in The Iron Heel. But all of these connections are exposed as no more than coincidences by the early drafts of the novel ... First he wrote 1980, then 1982, and only later 1984. The most fateful date in literature was a late amendment."

A 1947 draft manuscript of the first page of Nineteen Eighty-Four, showing the editorial development

In the run up to publication, Orwell called the novel "a beastly book" and expressed some disappointment towards it, thinking it would have been improved had he not been so ill. This was typical of Orwell, who had talked down his other books shortly before their release. Nevertheless, the book was enthusiastically received by Secker & Warburg, who acted quickly; before Orwell had left Jura he rejected their proposed blurb that portrayed it as "a thriller mixed up with a love story." He also refused a proposal from the American Book of the Month Club to release an edition without the appendix and chapter on Goldstein's book, a decision which Warburg claimed cut off about £40,000 in sales.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 in the UK; Orwell predicated earnings of around £500. A first print of 25,575 copies was followed by a further 5,000 copies in March and August 1950. The novel had the most immediate impact in the US, following its release there on 13 June 1949 by Harcourt Brace, & Co. An initial print of 20,000 copies was quickly followed by another 10,000 on 1 July, and again on 7 September. By 1970, over 8 million copies had been sold in the US and in 1984, it topped the country's all-time best seller list.

In June 1952, Orwell's widow Sonia Bronwell sold the only surviving manuscript at a charity auction for £50. The draft remains the only surviving literary manuscript from Orwell, and is presently held at the John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

In 1984, civilisation has been ravaged by world war, civil conflict, and revolution. Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain) is a province of Oceania, one of the three totalitarian super-states that rule the world. It is ruled by "The Party" under the ideology of " Ingsoc" (a Newspeak shortening of "English Socialism") and the mysterious leader Big Brother, who has an intense cult of personality. The Party brutally purges out anyone who does not fully conform to their regime, using the Thought Police and constant surveillance through telescreens (two-way televisions), cameras, and hidden microphones. Those who fall out of favour with the Party become "unpersons", disappearing with all evidence of their existence destroyed.

In London, Winston Smith is a member of the Outer Party, working at the Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites historical records to conform to the state's ever-changing version of history. Winston revises past editions of , while the original documents are destroyed after being dropped into ducts known as memory holes, which lead to an immense furnace. He secretly opposes the Party's rule and dreams of rebellion, despite knowing that he is already a " thought-criminal" and is likely to be caught one day.

While in a prole neighbourhood he meets Mr. Charrington, the owner of an antiques shop, and buys a diary where he writes criticisms of the Party and Big Brother. To his dismay, when he visits a prole quarter he discovers they have no political consciousness. As he works in the Ministry of Truth, he observes Julia, a young woman maintaining the novel-writing machines at the ministry, whom Winston suspects of being a spy, and develops an intense hatred of her. He vaguely suspects that his superior, an Inner Party official O'Brien, is part of an enigmatic underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood, formed by Big Brother's reviled political rival Emmanuel Goldstein.

One day, Julia secretly hands Winston a love note, and the two begin a secret affair. Julia explains that she also loathes the Party, but Winston observes that she is politically apathetic and uninterested in overthrowing the regime. Initially meeting in the country, they later meet in a rented room above Mr. Charrington's shop. During the affair, Winston remembers the disappearance of his family during the civil war of the 1950s and his tense relationship with his estranged wife Katharine. Weeks later, O'Brien invites Winston to his flat, where he introduces himself as a member of the Brotherhood and sends Winston a copy of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Goldstein. Meanwhile, during the nation's Hate Week, Oceania's enemy suddenly changes from Eurasia to Eastasia, which goes mostly unnoticed. Winston is recalled to the Ministry to help make the necessary revisions to the records. Winston and Julia read parts of Goldstein's book, which explains how the Party maintains power, the true meanings of its slogans, and the concept of perpetual war. It argues that the Party can be overthrown if proles rise up against it. However, Winston never gets the opportunity to read the chapter that explains 'why' the Party is motivated to maintain power.

Winston and Julia are captured when Mr. Charrington is revealed to be an undercover Thought Police agent, and they are separated and imprisoned at the Ministry of Love. O'Brien also reveals himself to be a member of the Thought Police and a member of a false flag operation which catches political dissidents of the Party. Over several months, Winston is starved and relentlessly tortured to bring his beliefs in line with the Party. O'Brien tells Winston that he will never know whether the Brotherhood actually exists and that Goldstein's book was written collaboratively by him and other Party members. For the final stage of re-education, O'Brien takes Winston to Room 101, which contains each prisoner's worst fear. When confronted with rats, Winston denounces Julia and pledges allegiance to the Party.

Winston is released into public life and continues to frequent the Chestnut Tree café. He encounters Julia, and both reveal that they have betrayed the other and are no longer in love. Back in the café, a news alert celebrates Oceania's supposed massive victory over Eurasian armies in Africa. Winston finally accepts that he loves Big Brother.

Winston Smith - the 39-year old protagonist who is a phlegmatic everyman harbouring thoughts of rebellion and is curious about the Party's power and the past before the Revolution.

Julia - Winston's lover who publicly espouses Party doctrine as a member of the fanatical Junior Anti-Sex League. Julia enjoys her small acts of rebellion and has no interest in giving up her lifestyle.

O'Brien - A mysterious character, O'Brien is a member of the Inner Party who poses as a member of The Brotherhood, the counter-revolutionary resistance, to catch Winston. He is a spy intending to deceive, trap, and capture Winston and Julia.

Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford - former members of the Inner Party whom Winston vaguely remembers as among the original leaders of the Revolution, long before he had heard of Big Brother. They confessed to treasonable conspiracies with foreign powers and were then executed in the political purges of the 1960s. In between their confessions and executions, Winston saw them drinking in the Chestnut Tree Café-with broken noses, suggesting that their confessions had been obtained by torture. Later, in the course of his editorial work, Winston sees newspaper evidence contradicting their confessions, but drops it into a memory hole. Eleven years later, he is confronted with the same photograph during his interrogation.

Ampleforth - Winston's one-time Records Department colleague who was imprisoned for leaving the word "God" in a Kipling poem as he could not find another rhyme for "rod"; Winston encounters him at the Ministry of Love. Ampleforth is a dreamer and intellectual who takes pleasure in his work, and respects poetry and language, traits which cause him disfavour with the Party.

Charrington - an undercover officer of the Thought Police masquerading as a kind and sympathetic antiques dealer amongst the proles.

Katharine Smith - the emotionally indifferent wife whom Winston "can't get rid of". Despite disliking sexual intercourse, Katharine married Winston because it was their "duty to the Party". Although she was a "goodthinkful" ideologue, they separated because the couple could not conceive children. Divorce is not permitted, but couples who cannot have children may live separately. For much of the story Winston lives in vague hope that Katharine may die or could be "got rid of" so that he may marry Julia. He regrets not having killed her by pushing her over the edge of a quarry when he had the chance many years previously.

Tom Parsons - Winston's naïve neighbour, and an ideal member of the Outer Party: an uneducated, suggestible man who is utterly loyal to the Party, and fully believes in its perfect image. He is socially active and participates in the Party activities for his social class. He is friendly towards Smith, and despite his political conformity punishes his bullying son for firing a catapult at Winston. Later, as a prisoner, Winston sees Parsons is in the Ministry of Love, as his daughter had reported him to the Thought Police, saying she heard him speak against Big Brother in his sleep. Even this does not dampen his belief in the Party, and he states he could do "good work" in the hard labour camps.

Mrs. Parsons - Parsons's wife is a wan and hapless woman who is intimidated by her own children.
The Parsons children - a nine-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. Both are members of the Spies, a youth organisation that focuses on indoctrinating children with Party ideals and training them to report any suspected incidents of unorthodoxy. They represent the new generation of Oceanian citizens, without memory of life before Big Brother, and without family ties or emotional sentiment; the model society envisioned by the Inner Party.

Syme - Winston's colleague at the Ministry of Truth, a lexicographer involved in compiling a new edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Although he is enthusiastic about his work and support for the Party, Winston notes, "He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly." Winston predicts, correctly, that Syme will become an unperson.

Additionally, the following characters, mentioned in the novel, play a significant role in the world-building of 1984. Whether these characters are real or fabrications of Party propaganda is something that neither Winston nor the reader is permitted to know:

Winston Smith's memories and his reading of the proscribed book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, reveal that after the Second World War, a Third World War broke out in the early 1950s in which nuclear weapons destroyed hundreds of cities in Europe, western Russia and North America (though not stated, it is implied this was a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union). Colchester was destroyed, and London also suffered widespread aerial raids, leading Winston's family to take refuge in a London Underground station.

During the war, the Soviet Union invaded and absorbed all of Continental Europe, while the United States absorbed the British Commonwealth and later Latin America. This formed the basis of Eurasia and Oceania respectively. Due to the instability perpetuated by the nuclear war, these new nations fell into civil war, but who fought whom is left unclear (there is a reference to the child Winston having seen rival militias in the streets, each one having a shirt of a distinct colour for its members). Meanwhile, Eastasia, the last superstate established, emerged only after "a decade of confused fighting". It includes the Asian lands conquered by China and Japan. Although Eastasia is prevented from matching Eurasia's size, its larger populace compensates for that handicap.

However, due to the fact that Winston only barely remembers these events as well as the Party's constant manipulation of historical records, the continuity and accuracy of these events are unknown, and exactly how the superstates' ruling parties managed to gain their power is also left unclear. If the official account was accurate, Smith's strengthening memories and the story of his family's dissolution suggest that the atomic bombings occurred first, followed by civil war featuring "confused street fighting in London itself" and the societal postwar reorganisation, which the Party retrospectively calls "the Revolution". It is very difficult to trace the exact chronology, but most of the global societal reorganisation occurred between 1945 and the early 1960s.

In 1984, there is a perpetual war between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, the superstates that emerged from the global atomic war. The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, explains that each state is so strong that it cannot be defeated, even with the combined forces of two superstates, despite changing alliances. To hide such contradictions, the superstates' governments rewrite history to explain that the (new) alliance always was so; the populaces are already accustomed to doublethink and accept it. The war is not fought in Oceanian, Eurasian or Eastasian territory but in the Arctic wastes and a disputed zone comprising the sea and land from Tangiers (Northern Africa) to Darwin (Australia). At the start, Oceania and Eastasia are allies fighting Eurasia in northern Africa and the Malabar Coast.

That alliance ends, and Oceania, allied with Eurasia, fights Eastasia, a change occurring on Hate Week, dedicated to creating patriotic fervour for the Party's perpetual war. The public are blind to the change; in mid-sentence, an orator changes the name of the enemy from "Eurasia" to "Eastasia" without pause. When the public are enraged at noticing that the wrong flags and posters are displayed, they tear them down; the Party later claims to have captured the whole of Africa.

Goldstein's book explains that the purpose of the unwinnable, perpetual war is to consume human labour and commodities so that the economy of a superstate cannot support economic equality, with a high standard of life for every citizen. By using up most of the produced goods, the proles are kept poor and uneducated, and the Party hopes that they will neither realise what the government is doing nor rebel. Goldstein also details an Oceanian strategy of attacking enemy cities with atomic rockets before invasion but dismisses it as unfeasible and contrary to the war's purpose; despite the atomic bombing of cities in the 1950s, the superstates stopped it for fear that it would imbalance the powers. The military technology in the novel differs little from that of World War II, but strategic bomber aeroplanes are replaced with rocket bombs, helicopters were heavily used as weapons of war (they were very minor in World War II) and surface combat units have been all but replaced by immense and unsinkable Floating Fortresses (island-like contraptions concentrating the firepower of a whole naval task force in a single, semi-mobile platform; in the novel, one is said to have been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands, suggesting a preference for sea lane interdiction and denial).

The three fictional superstates of the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four are Oceania (Black), Eurasia (Red), and Eastasia (Yellow). 'Disputed territories' are indicated in grey.

Three perpetually warring totalitarian superstates control the world in the novel:

Oceania (ideology: Ingsoc, known in Oldspeak as English Socialism), whose core territories are "the Americas, the Atlantic Islands, including the British Isles, Australasia and the southern portion of Africa".

Eurasia (ideology: Neo-Bolshevism), whose core territories are "the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic landmass from Portugal to the Bering Strait".

Eastasia (ideology: Obliteration of the Self, also known as Death-Worship), whose core territories are "China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands, and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet".

The perpetual war is fought for control of the "disputed area" lying between the frontiers of the superstates. The majority of the disputed territories form "a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong", including Equatorial Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, Indian subcontinent and Indonesia. Fighting also takes place along the unstable Eurasian-Eastasian border, over various islands in the Indian and Pacific Ocean, as well as around the North Pole.

In London, the capital city of Airstrip One, Oceania's four government ministries are in pyramids (300 m high), the façades of which display the Party's three slogans - "WAR IS PEACE", "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY", "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH". As mentioned, the ministries are deliberately named after the opposite ( doublethink) of their true functions: "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation." (Part II, chapter IX - "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" (by Emmanuel Goldstein)).

While a ministry is supposedly headed by a minister, the ministers heading these four ministries are never mentioned. They seem to be completely out of the public view, Big Brother being the only, ever-present public face of the government. Also, while an army fighting a war is typically headed by generals, none are ever mentioned by name. News reports of the ongoing war assume that Big Brother personally commands Oceania's fighting forces and give him personal credit for victories and successful strategic concepts.

The Ministry of Peace maintains Oceania's perpetual war against either of the two other superstates:

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognised and not recognised by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work.

The Ministry of Plenty rations and controls food, goods, and domestic production; every fiscal quarter, it claims to have raised the standard of living, even during times when it has, in fact, reduced rations, availability, and production. The Ministry of Truth substantiates the Ministry of Plenty's claims by manipulating historical records to report numbers supporting the claims of "increased rations". The Ministry of Plenty also runs the national lottery as a distraction for the proles; Party members understand it to be a sham in which all the larger prizes are "won" by imaginary people. Only small amounts are actually paid out.

The Ministry of Truth controls information: news, entertainment, education, and the arts. Winston Smith works in the Records Department, "rectifying" historical records to accord with Big Brother's current pronouncements so that everything the Party says appears to be true.

The Ministry of Love identifies, monitors, arrests and converts real and imagined dissidents. This is also the place where the Thought Police beat and torture dissidents, after which they are sent to Room 101 to face "the worst thing in the world"-until love for Big Brother and the Party replaces dissension.

Big Brother is a fictional character and symbol in the novel. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party Ingsoc wields total power "for its own sake" over the inhabitants. In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens (with the exception of the proles). The people are constantly reminded of this by the slogan "Big Brother is watching you": a maxim that is ubiquitously on display.

The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The Principles of Newspeak is an academic essay appended to the novel. It describes the development of Newspeak, an artificial, minimalistic language designed to ideologically align thought with the principles of Ingsoc by stripping down the English language in order to make the expression of "heretical" thoughts (i.e. thoughts going against Ingsoc's principles) impossible. The idea that a language's structure can be used to influence thought is known as linguistic relativity.

Whether or not the Newspeak appendix implies a hopeful end to Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a critical debate. Many claim that it does, citing the fact that it is in standard English and is written in the past tense: "Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised" (p. 422). Some critics ( Atwood, Benstead, Milner, Pynchon) claim that for Orwell, Newspeak and the totalitarian governments are all in the past.

Thoughtcrime describes a person's politically unorthodox thoughts, such as unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the tenets of Ingsoc (English Socialism), the dominant ideology of Oceania. In the official language of Newspeak, the word crimethink describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of the Party controls the speech, the actions, and the thoughts of the citizens of Oceania. In contemporary English usage, the word thoughtcrime describes beliefs that are contrary to accepted norms of society, and is used to describe theological concepts, such as disbelief and idolatry, and the rejection of an ideology.

Nineteen Eighty-Four expands upon the subjects summarised in Orwell's essay " Notes on Nationalism" about the lack of vocabulary needed to explain the unrecognised phenomena behind certain political forces. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party's artificial, minimalist language 'Newspeak' addresses the matter.

Positive nationalism: For instance, Oceanians' perpetual love for Big Brother. Orwell argues in the essay that ideologies such as Neo-Toryism and Celtic nationalism are defined by their obsessive sense of loyalty to some entity.

Negative nationalism: For instance, Oceanians' perpetual hatred for Emmanuel Goldstein. Orwell argues in the essay that ideologies such as Trotskyism and Antisemitism are defined by their obsessive hatred of some entity.

Transferred nationalism: For instance, when Oceania's enemy changes, an orator makes a change mid-sentence, and the crowd instantly transfers its hatred to the new enemy. Orwell argues that ideologies such as Stalinism and redirected feelings of racial animus and class superiority among wealthy intellectuals exemplify this. Transferred nationalism swiftly redirects emotions from one power unit to another. In the novel, it happens during Hate Week, a Party rally against the original enemy. The crowd goes wild and destroys the posters that are now against their new friend, and many say that they must be the act of an agent of their new enemy and former friend. Many of the crowd must have put up the posters before the rally but think that the state of affairs had always been the case.

O'Brien concludes: "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

In the book, Inner Party member O'Brien describes the Party's vision of the future:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always-do not forget this, Winston-always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever.

-  Part III, chapter III, Nineteen Eighty-Four

One of the most notable themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four is censorship, especially in the Ministry of Truth, where photographs and public archives are manipulated to rid them of "unpersons" (people who have been erased from history by the Party). On the telescreens, almost all figures of production are grossly exaggerated or simply fabricated to indicate an ever-growing economy, even during times when the reality is the opposite. One small example of the endless censorship is Winston being charged with the task of eliminating a reference to an unperson in a newspaper article. He also proceeds to write an article about Comrade Ogilvy, a made-up party member who allegedly "displayed great heroism by leaping into the sea from a helicopter so that the dispatches he was carrying would not fall into enemy hands."

In Oceania, the upper and middle classes have very little true privacy. All of their houses and apartments are equipped with telescreens so that they may be watched or listened to at any time. Similar telescreens are found at workstations and in public places, along with hidden microphones. Written correspondence is routinely opened and read by the government before it is delivered. The Thought Police employ undercover agents, who pose as normal citizens and report any person with subversive tendencies. Children are encouraged to report suspicious persons to the government, and some denounce their parents. Citizens are controlled, and the smallest sign of rebellion, even something as small as a suspicious facial expression, can result in immediate arrest and imprisonment. Thus, citizens are compelled to obedience.

According to Goldstein's book, almost the entire world lives in poverty; hunger, thirst, disease, and filth are the norms. Ruined cities and towns are common: the consequence of perpetual wars and extreme economic inefficiency. Social decay and wrecked buildings surround Winston; aside from the ministries' headquarters, little of London was rebuilt. Middle class citizens and proles consume synthetic foodstuffs and poor-quality "luxuries" such as oily gin and loosely-packed cigarettes, distributed under the "Victory" brand, a parody of the low-quality Indian-made "Victory" cigarettes, which British soldiers commonly smoked during World War II.

Winston describes something as simple as the repair of a broken window as requiring committee approval that can take several years and so most of those living in one of the blocks usually do the repairs themselves (Winston himself is called in by Mrs. Parsons to repair her blocked sink). All upper-class and middle-class residences include telescreens that serve both as outlets for propaganda and surveillance devices that allow the Thought Police to monitor them; they can be turned down, but the ones in middle-class residences cannot be turned off.

In contrast to their subordinates, the upper class of Oceanian society reside in clean and comfortable flats in their own quarters, with pantries well-stocked with foodstuffs such as wine, real coffee, real tea, real milk, and real sugar, all denied to the general populace. Winston is astonished that the lifts in O'Brien's building work, the telescreens can be completely turned off, and O'Brien has an Asian manservant, Martin. All upper class citizens are attended to by slaves captured in the "disputed zone", and "The Book" suggests that many have their own cars or even helicopters.

However, despite their insulation and overt privileges, the upper class are still not exempt from the government's brutal restriction of thought and behaviour, even while lies and propaganda apparently originate from their own ranks. Instead, the Oceanian government offers the upper class their "luxuries" in exchange for them maintaining their loyalty to the state; non-conformant upper-class citizens can still be condemned, tortured, and executed just like any other individual. "The Book" makes clear that the upper class' living conditions are only "relatively" comfortable, and would be regarded as "austere" by those of the pre-revolutionary élite.

The proles live in poverty and are kept sedated with pornography, a national lottery whose winnings are rarely paid out, and gin, "which the proles were not supposed to drink". At the same time, the proles are freer and less intimidated than the upper classes: they are not expected to be particularly patriotic and the levels of surveillance that they are subjected to are very low; they lack telescreens in their own homes. "The Book" indicates that because the middle class, not the lower class, traditionally starts revolutions, the model demands tight control of the middle class, with ambitious Outer-Party members neutralised via promotion to the Inner Party or "reintegration" by the Ministry of Love, and proles can be allowed intellectual freedom because they are deemed to lack intellect. Winston nonetheless believes that "the future belonged to the proles".

The standard of living of the populace is extremely low overall. Consumer goods are scarce, and those available through official channels are of low quality; for instance, despite the Party regularly reporting increased boot production, more than half of the Oceanian populace goes barefoot. The Party claims that poverty is a necessary sacrifice for the war effort, and "The Book" confirms that to be partially correct since the purpose of perpetual war is to consume surplus industrial production. As "The Book" explains, society is in fact designed to remain on the brink of starvation, as "In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."

Nineteen Eighty-Four uses themes from life in the Soviet Union and wartime life in Great Britain as sources for many of its motifs. Some time at an unspecified date after the first American publication of the book, producer Sidney Sheldon wrote to Orwell interested in adapting the novel to the Broadway stage. Orwell wrote in a letter to Sheldon (to whom he would sell the US stage rights) that his basic goal with Nineteen Eighty-Four was imagining the consequences of Stalinist government ruling British society:

[ Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

According to Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor, the author's A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) has "essentially the same plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four ... It's about somebody who is spied upon, and eavesdropped upon, and oppressed by vast exterior forces they can do nothing about. It makes an attempt at rebellion and then has to compromise".

A 1931 poster for the [first five-year plan of the Soviet Union by Yakov Guminer ru] reading "The arithmetic of an industrial-financial counter-plan: 2 + 2 plus the enthusiasm of the workers = 5"

The statement " 2 + 2 = 5", used to torment Winston Smith during his interrogation, was a communist party slogan from the second five-year plan, which encouraged fulfilment of the five-year plan in four years. The slogan was seen in electric lights on Moscow house-fronts, billboards and elsewhere.

The switch of Oceania's allegiance from Eastasia to Eurasia and the subsequent rewriting of history ("Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete"; ch 9) is evocative of the Soviet Union's changing relations with Nazi Germany. The two nations were open and frequently vehement critics of each other until the signing of the 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression. Thereafter, and continuing until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, no criticism of Germany was allowed in the Soviet press, and all references to prior party lines stopped-including in the majority of non-Russian communist parties who tended to follow the Russian line. Orwell had criticised the Communist Party of Great Britain for supporting the Treaty in his essays for Betrayal of the Left (1941). "The Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 reversed the Soviet Union's stated foreign policy. It was too much for many of the fellow-travellers like Gollancz [Orwell's sometime publisher] who had put their faith in a strategy of construction Popular Front governments and the peace bloc between Russia, Britain and France."

The description of Emmanuel Goldstein, with a "small, goatee beard", evokes the image of Leon Trotsky. The film of Goldstein during the Two Minutes Hate is described as showing him being transformed into a bleating sheep. This image was used in a propaganda film during the Kino-eye period of Soviet film, which showed Trotsky transforming into a goat. Like Goldstein, Trotsky was a formerly high-ranking party official who was ostracized and then wrote a book criticizing party rule, The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1936.

The omnipresent images of Big Brother, a man described as having a moustache, bears resemblance to the cult of personality built up around Joseph Stalin.

The news in Oceania emphasised production figures, just as it did in the Soviet Union, where record-setting in factories (by " Heroes of Socialist Labour") was especially glorified. The best known of these was Alexei Stakhanov, who purportedly set a record for coal mining in 1935.

The tortures of the Ministry of Love evoke the procedures used by the NKVD in their interrogations, including the use of rubber truncheons, being forbidden to put your hands in your pockets, remaining in brightly lit rooms for days, torture through the use of their greatest fear, and the victim being shown a mirror after their physical collapse.

The Thought Police is based on the NKVD, which arrested people for random "anti-soviet" remarks.

The confessions of the "Thought Criminals" Rutherford, Aaronson, and Jones are based on the show trials of the 1930s, which included fabricated confessions by prominent Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev to the effect that they were being paid by the Nazi government to undermine the Soviet regime under Leon Trotsky's direction.

The song " Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree" ("Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me") was based on an old English song called "Go no more a-rushing" ("Under the spreading chestnut tree, Where I knelt upon my knee, We were as happy as could be, 'Neath the spreading chestnut tree."). The song was published as early as 1891. The song was a popular camp song in the 1920s, sung with corresponding movements (like touching one's chest when singing "chest", and touching one's head when singing "nut"). Glenn Miller recorded the song in 1939.

The "Hates" (Two Minutes Hate and Hate Week) were inspired by the constant rallies sponsored by party organs throughout the Stalinist period. These were often short pep-talks given to workers before their shifts began (Two Minutes Hate), but could also last for days, as in the annual celebrations of the anniversary of the October Revolution (Hate Week).

Orwell fictionalised "newspeak", "doublethink", and "Ministry of Truth" based on both the Soviet press, and British wartime usage, such as "Miniform". In particular, he adapted Soviet ideological discourse constructed to ensure that public statements could not be questioned.

Winston Smith's job, "revising history" (and the "unperson" motif) are based on censorship of images in the Soviet Union, which airbrushed images of "fallen" people from group photographs and removed references to them in books and newspapers. In one well-known example, the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia had an article about Lavrentiy Beria. After his fall from power and execution, subscribers received a letter from the editor instructing them to cut out and destroy the three-page article on Beria and paste in its place enclosed replacement pages expanding the adjacent articles on F. W. Bergholz (an 18th-century courtier), the Bering Sea, and Bishop Berkeley.

Big Brother's "Orders of the Day" were inspired by Stalin's regular wartime orders, called by the same name. A small collection of the more political of these have been published (together with his wartime speeches) in English as On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin. Like Big Brother's Orders of the day, Stalin's frequently lauded heroic individuals, like Comrade Ogilvy, the fictitious hero Winston Smith invented to "rectify" (fabricate) a Big Brother Order of the day.

The Ingsoc slogan "Our new, happy life", repeated from telescreens, evokes Stalin's 1935 statement, which became a CPSU slogan, "Life has become better, Comrades; life has become more cheerful."

During World War II, Orwell believed that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war. The question being "Would it end via Fascist coup d'état from above or via Socialist revolution from below?" Later, he admitted that events proved him wrong: "What really matters is that I fell into the trap of assuming that 'the war and the revolution are inseparable'."

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) share themes of the betrayed revolution, the individual's subordination to the collective, rigorously enforced class distinctions (Inner Party, Outer Party, proles), the cult of personality, concentration camps, Thought Police, compulsory regimented daily exercise, and youth leagues. Oceania resulted from the US annexation of the British Empire to counter the Asian peril to Australia and New Zealand. It is a naval power whose militarism venerates the sailors of the floating fortresses, from which battle is given to recapturing India, the "Jewel in the Crown" of the British Empire. Much of Oceanic society is based upon the USSR under Joseph Stalin- Big Brother. The televised Two Minutes Hate is ritual demonisation of the enemies of the State, especially Emmanuel Goldstein ( viz Leon Trotsky). Altered photographs and newspaper articles create unpersons deleted from the national historical record, including even founding members of the regime (Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford) in the 1960s purges ( viz the Soviet Purges of the 1930s, in which leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were similarly treated). A similar thing also happened during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror in which many of the original leaders of the Revolution were later put to death, for example Danton who was put to death by Robespierre, and then later Robespierre himself met the same fate.

In his 1946 essay " Why I Write", Orwell explains that the serious works he wrote since the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) were "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism". Nineteen Eighty-Four is a cautionary tale about revolution betrayed by totalitarian defenders previously proposed in Homage to Catalonia (1938) and Animal Farm (1945), while Coming Up for Air (1939) celebrates the personal and political freedoms lost in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Biographer Michael Shelden notes Orwell's Edwardian childhood at Henley-on-Thames as the golden country; being bullied at St Cyprian's School as his empathy with victims; his life in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and the techniques of violence and censorship in the BBC as capricious authority.

Other influences include Darkness at Noon (1940) and The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) by Arthur Koestler; The Iron Heel (1908) by Jack London; 1920: Dips into the Near Future by John A. Hobson; Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley; (1921) by Yevgeny Zamyatin which he reviewed in 1946; and The Managerial Revolution (1940) by James Burnham predicting perpetual war among three totalitarian superstates. Orwell told Jacintha Buddicom that he would write a novel stylistically like A Modern Utopia (1905) by H. G. Wells.

Extrapolating from World War II, the novel's pastiche parallels the politics and rhetoric at war's end-the changed alliances at the " Cold War's" (1945-91) beginning; the Ministry of Truth derives from the BBC's overseas service, controlled by the Ministry of Information; Room 101 derives from a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House; the Senate House of the University of London, containing the Ministry of Information is the architectural inspiration for the Minitrue; the post-war decrepitude derives from the socio-political life of the UK and the US, i.e., the impoverished Britain of 1948 losing its Empire despite newspaper-reported imperial triumph; and war ally but peace-time foe, Soviet Russia became Eurasia.

The term "English Socialism" has precedents in Orwell's wartime writings; in the essay " The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (1941), he said that "the war and the revolution are inseparable... the fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a textbook word into a realisable policy"-because Britain's superannuated social class system hindered the war effort and only a socialist economy would defeat Adolf Hitler. Given the middle class's grasping this, they too would abide socialist revolution and that only reactionary Britons would oppose it, thus limiting the force revolutionaries would need to take power. An English Socialism would come about which "will never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word."

In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, "English Socialism" (or " Ingsoc" in Newspeak) is a totalitarian ideology unlike the English revolution he foresaw. Comparison of the wartime essay "The Lion and the Unicorn" with Nineteen Eighty-Four shows that he perceived a Big Brother regime as a perversion of his cherished socialist ideals and English Socialism. Thus Oceania is a corruption of the British Empire he believed would evolve "into a federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet Republics".

When it was first published, Nineteen Eighty-Four received critical acclaim. V. S. Pritchett, reviewing the novel for the New Statesman stated: "I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down." P. H. Newby, reviewing Nineteen Eighty-Four for The Listener magazine, described it as "the most arresting political novel written by an Englishman since Rex Warner's The Aerodrome." Nineteen Eighty-Four was also praised by Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster and Harold Nicolson. On the other hand, Edward Shanks, reviewing Nineteen Eighty-Four for The Sunday Times, was dismissive; Shanks claimed Nineteen Eighty-Four "breaks all records for gloomy vaticination". C. S. Lewis was also critical of the novel, claiming that the relationship of Julia and Winston, and especially the Party's view on sex, lacked credibility, and that the setting was "odious rather than tragic".

On its publication, many American reviewers interpreted the book as a statement on British Prime Minister Clement Attlee's socialist policies, or the policies of Joseph Stalin. Serving as prime minister from 1945 to 1951, Attlee implemented wide-ranging social reforms and changes in the British economy following World War II. American trade union leader Francis A. Hanson wanted to recommend the book to his members but was concerned with some of the reviews it had received, so Orwell wrote a letter to him. In his letter, Orwell described his book as a satire, and said:

I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will necessarily arrive, but I believe (allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive...[it is] a show...[of the] perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realisable in communism and fascism.

-  George Orwell, Letter to Francis A. Hanson

Throughout its publication history, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been either banned or legally challenged as subversive or ideologically corrupting, like the dystopian novels (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, Darkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur Koestler, (1940) by Karin Boye, and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury.

On 5 November 2019, the BBC named Nineteen Eighty-Four on its list of the 100 most influential novels.

According to Czesław Miłosz, an exile from Stalinist Poland, the book also made an impression behind the Iron Curtain. Writing in The Captive Mind, he stated "[a] few have become acquainted with Orwell's 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well ... Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life." Writer Christopher Hitchens has called this "one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever bestowed upon another ... Only one or two years after Orwell's death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party."

In the same year as the novel's publishing, a one-hour radio adaptation was aired on the United States' NBC radio network as part of the NBC University Theatre series. The first television adaptation appeared as part of CBS's series in September 1953. BBC Television broadcast an adaptation by Nigel Kneale in December 1954. The first feature film adaptation, 1984, was released in 1956. A second feature-length adaptation, Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed in 1984, a reasonably faithful adaptation of the novel. The story has been adapted several other times to radio, television, and film; other media adaptations include theater (a musical and a play), opera, and ballet.

Nineteen Eighty-Four Russian version published in the Soviet Union in 1984. A limited edition, only for members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The novel was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, when the first publicly available Russian version in the country, translated by Vyacheslav Nedoshivin, was published in Kodry, a literary journal of Soviet Moldavia. In 1989, another Russian version, translated by Viktor Golyshev, was also published. Outside the Soviet Union, the first Russian version was serialised in the emigre magazine Grani in the mid-1950s, then published as a book in 1957 in Frankfurt. Another Russian version, translated by Sergei Tolstoy from French version, was published in Rome in 1966. These translations were smuggled into the Soviet Union, which became quite popular among dissidents. Some underground published translations also appeared in the Soviet Union, for example, Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov translated the novel from German version into a Russian version.

For Soviet elite, as early as 1959, according to the order of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the Foreign Literature Publishers secretly issued a Russian version of the novel, for the senior officers of the Communist Party.

In the People's Republic of China, the first Simplified Chinese version, translated by Dong Leshan, was serialised in the periodical Selected Translations from Foreign Literature in 1979, for senior officials and intellectuals deemed politically reliable enough. In 1985, the Chinese version was published by Huacheng Publishing House, as a restricted publication. It was first available to the general public in 1988, by the same Publisher. Amy Hawkins and Jeffrey Wasserstrom of The Atlantic stated in 2019 that the book is widely available in Mainland China for several reasons: the general public by and large no longer reads books; because the elites who do read books feel connected to the ruling party anyway; and because the Communist Party sees being too aggressive in blocking cultural products as a liability. The authors stated "It was-and remains-as easy to buy 1984 and Animal Farm in Shenzhen or Shanghai as it is in London or Los Angeles." They also stated that "The assumption is not that Chinese people can't figure out the meaning of 1984, but that the small number of people who will bother to read it won't pose much of a threat." British journalist Michael Rank argued that it is only because the novel is set in London and written by a foreigner that the Chinese authorities believe it has nothing to do with China.

By 1989, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been translated into 65 languages, more than any other novel in English at that time.

"Happy 1984" (in Spanish or Portuguese) stencil graffito, denoting mind control via a PlayStation controller, on a standing piece of the Berlin Wall, 2005

The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on the English language is extensive; the concepts of Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police, thoughtcrime, unperson, memory hole (oblivion), doublethink (simultaneously holding and believing contradictory beliefs) and Newspeak (ideological language) have become common phrases for denoting totalitarian authority. Doublespeak and groupthink are both deliberate elaborations of doublethink, and the adjective "Orwellian" means similar to Orwell's writings, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four. The practice of ending words with "-speak" (such as mediaspeak) is drawn from the novel. Orwell is perpetually associated with 1984; in July 1984, an asteroid was discovered by Antonín Mrkos and named after Orwell.

References to the themes, concepts and plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four have appeared frequently in other works, especially in popular music and video entertainment. An example is the worldwide hit reality television show Big Brother, in which a group of people live together in a large house, isolated from the outside world but continuously watched by television cameras.

In November 2012, the US government argued before the US Supreme Court that it wants to continue utilising GPS tracking of individuals without first seeking a warrant. In response, Justice Stephen Breyer questioned what that means for a democratic society by referencing Nineteen Eighty-Four. Justice Breyer asked, "If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States. So if you win, you suddenly produce what sounds like Nineteen Eighty-Four... "

The book touches on the invasion of privacy and ubiquitous surveillance. From mid-2013 it was publicised that the NSA has been secretly monitoring and storing global internet traffic, including the bulk data collection of email and phone call data. Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four increased by up to seven times within the first week of the 2013 mass surveillance leaks. The book again topped the Amazon.com sales charts in 2017 after a controversy involving Kellyanne Conway using the phrase " alternative facts" to explain discrepancies with the media.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was number three on the list of "Top Check Outs Of All Time" by the New York Public Library.

Nineteen Eighty-Four entered the public domain on 1 January 2021, 70 calendar years after Orwell's death, in much of the world. It is still under copyright in the US until 95 years after publication, or 2044.

Brave New World comparisons

In October 1949, after reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley sent a letter to Orwell in which he argued that it would be more efficient for rulers to stay in power by the softer touch by allowing citizens to seek pleasure to control them rather than use brute force. He wrote:

Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

...

Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

In the decades since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, there have been numerous comparisons to Huxley's Brave New World, which had been published 17 years earlier, in 1932. They are both predictions of societies dominated by a central government and are both based on extensions of the trends of their times. However, members of the ruling class of Nineteen Eighty-Four use brutal force, torture and harsh mind control to keep individuals in line, while rulers in Brave New World keep the citizens in line by drugs, hypnosis, genetic conditioning and pleasurable distractions. Regarding censorship, in Nineteen Eighty-Four the government tightly controls information to keep the population in line, but in Huxley's world, so much information is published that readers do not know which information is relevant, and what can be disregarded.

Elements of both novels can be seen in modern-day societies, with Huxley's vision being more dominant in the West and Orwell's vision more prevalent with dictatorships, including those in communist countries (such as in modern-day China and North Korea), as is pointed out in essays that compare the two novels, including Huxley's own Brave New World Revisited.

Comparisons with later dystopian novels like The Handmaid's Tale, Virtual Light, The Private Eye and The Children of Men have also been drawn.

In 1955, an episode of BBC's The Goon Show, 1985, was broadcast, written by Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes and based on Nigel Kneale's television adaptation. It was re-recorded about a month later with the same script but a slightly different cast. 1985 parodies many of the main scenes in Orwell's novel.

In 1970, the American rock group Spirit released the song "1984" based on Orwell's novel.

In 1973, ex-Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper released an album called 1984 on the Columbia label (UK), consisting of instrumentals with Orwellian titles such as "Miniluv", "Minipax", "Minitrue", and so forth.

In 1974, David Bowie released the album Diamond Dogs, which is thought to be loosely based on the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It includes the tracks "We Are The Dead", "1984" and "Big Brother". Before the album was made, Bowie's management (MainMan) had planned for Bowie and Tony Ingrassia (MainMan's creative consultant) to co-write and direct a musical production of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but Orwell's widow refused to give MainMan the rights.

In 1977, the British rock band The Jam released the album This Is the Modern World, which includes the track "Standards" by Paul Weller. This track concludes with the lyrics "...and ignorance is strength, we have God on our side, look, you know what happened to Winston."

In 1984, Ridley Scott directed a television commercial, "1984", to launch Apple's Macintosh computer. The advert stated, "1984 won't be like 1984", suggesting that the Apple Mac would be freedom from Big Brother, i.e., the IBM PC.

An episode of , called "The God Complex", depicts an alien ship disguised as a hotel containing Room 101-like spaces, and also, like the novel, quotes the nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons".

The two part episode Chain of Command on Star Trek: The Next Generation bears some resemblances to the novel.

Radiohead's 2003 single "2 + 2 = 5", from their album Hail to the Thief, is Orwellian by title and content. Thom Yorke states, "I was listening to a lot of political programs on BBC Radio 4. I found myself writing down little nonsense phrases, those Orwellian euphemisms that [the British and American governments] are so fond of. They became the background of the record."

In September 2009, the English progressive rock band Muse released The Resistance, which included songs influenced by Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In Marilyn Manson's autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, he states: "I was thoroughly terrified by the idea of the end of the world and the Antichrist. So I became obsessed with it... reading prophetic books like... 1984 by George Orwell..."

English band Bastille references the novel in their song "Back to the Future", the fifth track on their 2022 album Give Me the Future, in the opening lyrics: "Feels like we danced into a nightmare/We're living 1984/If doublethink's no longer fiction/We'll dream of Huxley's Island shores."

Released in 2004, KAKU P-Model/Susumu Hirasawa's song Big Brother directly references 1984, and the album itself is about a fictional dystopia in a distant future.

Aubrey, Crispin; Chilton, Paul, eds. (1983). Nineteen Eighty-four in 1984: Autonomy, Control, and Communication (repr. ed.). London: Comedia Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-906890-42-4.

Bloom, Harold, George Orwell's 1984 (2009), Facts on File, Inc. ISBN 978-1-4381-1468-2

Di Nucci, Ezio and Storrie, Stefan (editors), 1984 and Philosophy: Is Resistance Futile? (2018), Open Court Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-8126-9985-2

Goldsmith, Jack and Nussbaum, Martha, On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future (2010), Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-2664-3

Hillegas, Mark R. (1967). The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-0676-3

Howe, Irving, ed. (1983). 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century. New York: Harper Row. ISBN 978-0-06-080660-6.

Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. A novel. London: Secker & Warburg.

Orwell, George (1984). Davison, Peter (ed.). Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Facsimile Manuscript. London, United Kingdom: Secker & Warburg. ISBN 978-0-436-35022-1 - via Internet Archive.

Orwell, George (1977). 1984. Erich Fromm (foreword) (reissue ed.). Signet Classics. ISBN 978-0-451-52493-5.

Orwell, George. 1984 (Vietnamese edition), translation by Đặng Phương-Nghi, French preface by Bertrand Latour ISBN 978-0-9774224-5-6.

Plank, Robert, George Orwell's Guide Through Hell: A Psychological Study of 1984 (1994), Borgo Pres. ISBN 978-0-89370-413-1

Smith, David; Mosher, Michael (1984). Orwell for Beginners (1st ed.). [London], England: Writers and Readers Pub. Cooperative. ISBN 978-0-86316-066-0.

Steinhoff, William R. (1975). George Orwell and the Origins of 1984. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-87400-2.

Taylor, D. J. On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography (2019), Abrams. ISBN 978-1-68335-684-4

Tuccille, Jerome (1975). Who's Afraid of 1984? The case for optimism in looking ahead to the 1980s. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House Publishers. ISBN 978-0-87000-308-0 - via Internet Archive.

Waddell, Nathan (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (2020), Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-84109-2

West, W. J. (1992). The Larger Evils - Nineteen Eighty-Four: the Truth Behind the Satire. Edinburgh: Canongate Press. ISBN 978-0-86241-382-8.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984 ) is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society.

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A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 dystopian crime film adapted, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It employs disturbing, violent images to comment on psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, and other social, political, and economic subjects in a dystopian near-future Britain.

Alex ( Malcolm McDowell), the central character, is a charismatic, anti-social delinquent whose interests include classical music (especially Beethoven), committing rape, theft, and ultra-violence. He leads a small gang of thugs, Pete ( Michael Tarn), Georgie ( James Marcus), and Dim ( Warren Clarke), whom he calls his droogs (from the Russian word друг, which is "friend", "buddy"). The film chronicles the horrific crime spree of his gang, his capture, and attempted rehabilitation via an experimental psychological conditioning technique (the "Ludovico Technique") promoted by the Minister of the Interior ( Anthony Sharp). Alex narrates most of the film in Nadsat, a fractured adolescent slang composed of Slavic languages (especially Russian), English, and Cockney rhyming slang.

The film premiered in New York City on 19 December 1971 and was released in the United Kingdom on 13 January 1972. The film was met with polarised reviews from critics and was controversial due to its depictions of graphic violence. After it was cited as having inspired copycat acts of violence, the film was withdrawn from British cinemas at Kubrick's behest, and it was also banned in several other countries. In the years following, the film underwent a critical re-evaluation and gained a cult following. It received several awards and nominations, including four nominations at the 44th Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the world's greatest films, A Clockwork Orange was ranked 75th in the directors' poll and 235th in the critics' poll. In 2020, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Human furniture from the Korova milk bar, where the "milk-plus" was served

In a futuristic Britain, Alex DeLarge is the leader of a gang of "droogs": Georgie, Dim and Pete. One night, after getting intoxicated on drug-laden "milk-plus", they engage in an evening of "ultra-violence", which includes a fight with a rival gang. They drive to the country home of writer Frank Alexander and trick his wife into letting them inside. They beat Alexander to the point of crippling him, and Alex violently rapes Alexander's wife while singing " Singin' in the Rain". The next day, while truant from school, Alex is approached by his probation officer, PR Deltoid, who is aware of Alex's activities and cautions him.

Alex's droogs express discontent with petty crime and want more equality and high-yield thefts, but Alex asserts his authority by attacking them. Later, Alex invades the home of a wealthy "cat-lady" and bludgeons her with a phallic sculpture while his droogs remain outside. On hearing sirens, Alex tries to flee, but Dim smashes a bottle in his face, stunning Alex and leaving him to be arrested. Deltoid brings word that the woman has died of her injuries, and Alex is convicted of murder and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Two years into the sentence, Alex eagerly takes up an offer to be a test subject for the Minister of the Interior's new Ludovico technique, an experimental aversion therapy for rehabilitating criminals within two weeks. Alex is strapped to a chair, his eyes are clamped open, and he is injected with drugs. He is then forced to watch films of sex and violence, some of which are accompanied by the music of his favourite composer, Ludwig van Beethoven. Alex becomes nauseated by the films and, fearing the technique will make him sick upon hearing Beethoven, begs for an end to the treatment.

Two weeks later, the Minister demonstrates Alex's rehabilitation to a gathering of officials. Alex is unable to fight back against an actor who taunts and attacks him and becomes ill upon seeing a topless woman. The prison chaplain complains that Alex has been robbed of his free will; the Minister asserts that the Ludovico technique will cut crime and alleviate crowding in prisons.

Alex is released from prison, only to find that the police have sold his possessions to provide compensation to his victims and his parents have let out his room. Alex encounters an elderly vagrant whom he attacked years earlier, and the vagrant and his friends attack him. Alex is saved by two policemen but is shocked to find they are his former droogs Dim and Georgie. They drive him to the countryside, beat him, and nearly drown him before abandoning him. Alex barely makes it to the doorstep of a nearby home before collapsing.

Alex wakes up to find himself in the home of Mr Alexander, who is now using a wheelchair. Alexander does not recognise Alex from the previous attack, but knows of him and the Ludovico technique from the newspapers. He sees Alex as a political weapon and prepares to present him to his colleagues. While bathing, Alex breaks into "Singin' in the Rain", causing Alexander to realise that Alex was the person who assaulted his wife and him. With help from his colleagues, Alexander drugs Alex and locks him in an upstairs bedroom. He then plays Beethoven's Ninth Symphony loudly from the floor below. Unable to withstand the sickening pain, Alex attempts suicide by jumping out of the window.

Alex survives the attempt and wakes up in hospital with multiple injuries. While being given a series of psychological tests, he finds that he no longer has aversions to violence and sex. The Minister arrives and apologises to Alex. He informs Alex that the government has had Mr Alexander institutionalised. He offers to take care of Alex and get him a job in return for his co-operation with his election campaign and public relations counter-offensive. As a sign of goodwill, the Minister brings in a stereo system playing Beethoven's Ninth. Alex then contemplates violence and has vivid thoughts of having sex with a woman in front of an approving crowd, thinking to himself, "I was cured, all right!"

Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge.

The film provided early roles for Steven Berkoff, David Prowse, and Carol Drinkwater, who appeared as a police officer, Mr Alexander's attendant Julian, and a nurse, respectively.

The film's central moral question is the definition of "goodness" and whether it makes sense to use aversion therapy to stop immoral behaviour. Stanley Kubrick, writing in Saturday Review, described the film: "A social satire dealing with the question of whether behavioural psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots." Similarly, on the production's call sheet, Kubrick wrote: "It is a story of the dubious redemption of a teenage delinquent by condition-reflex therapy. It is, at the same time, a running lecture on free-will."

After aversion therapy, Alex behaves like a good member of society, though not through choice. His goodness is involuntary; he has become the titular clockwork orange-organic on the outside, mechanical on the inside. After Alex has undergone the Ludovico technique, the chaplain criticises his new attitude as false, arguing that true goodness must come from within. This leads to the theme of abusing liberties-personal, governmental, civil-by Alex, with two conflicting political forces, the Government and the Dissidents, both manipulating Alex purely for their own political ends. The story portrays the "conservative" and "leftist" parties as equally worthy of criticism. The writer Frank Alexander, a victim of Alex and his gang, wants revenge against Alex and sees him as a means of definitively turning the populace against the incumbent government and its new regime. He fears the new government and, in a telephone conversation, he says: "Recruiting brutal young roughs into the police; proposing debilitating and will-sapping techniques of conditioning. Oh, we've seen it all before in other countries; the thin end of the wedge! Before we know where we are, we shall have the full apparatus of totalitarianism."

On the other side, the Minister of the Interior (the Government) jails Mr Alexander (the Dissident Intellectual) on the excuse of his endangering Alex (the People), rather than the government's totalitarian regime (described by Mr Alexander). It is unclear whether he has been harmed; however, the Minister tells Alex that the writer has been denied the ability to write and produce "subversive" material that is critical of the incumbent government and meant to provoke political unrest.

Ludovico technique apparatus

The film critiques the behaviourism or "behavioural psychology" propounded by psychologists John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Burgess disapproved of behaviourism, calling Skinner's book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) "one of the most dangerous books ever written". Although behaviourism's limitations were conceded by its principal founder, Watson, Skinner argued that behaviour modification-specifically, operant conditioning (learned behaviours via systematic reward-and-punishment techniques) rather than the "classical" Watsonian conditioning-is the key to an ideal society. The film's Ludovico technique is widely perceived as a parody of aversion therapy, which is a form of classical conditioning.

Author Paul Duncan said: "Alex is the narrator so we see everything from his point of view, including his mental images. The implication is that all of the images, both real and imagined, are part of Alex's fantasies."

Psychiatrist Aaron Stern, the former head of the MPAA rating board, believed that Alex represents man in his natural state, the unconscious mind. Alex becomes "civilised" after receiving his Ludovico "cure" and the sickness in the aftermath Stern considered to be the "neurosis imposed by society".

Kubrick told film critics Philip Strick and Penelope Houston: "Alex makes no attempt to deceive himself or the audience as to his total corruption or wickedness. He is the very personification of evil. On the other hand, he has winning qualities: his total candour, his wit, his intelligence, and his energy; these are attractive qualities and ones, I might add, which he shares with Richard III."

The society depicted in the film was perceived by some as Communist (as Michel Ciment pointed out in an interview with Kubrick) due to its slight ties to Russian culture. The teenage slang has a heavily Russian influence, as in the novel; Burgess explains the slang as being, in part, intended to draw a reader into the world of the book's characters and to prevent the book from becoming outdated. There is some evidence to suggest that the society is a socialist one, or perhaps a society evolving from a failed socialism into an authoritarian society. In the novel, streets have paintings of working men in the style of Russian socialist art, and the film shows a mural of socialist artwork with obscenities drawn on it. As Malcolm McDowell points out on the DVD commentary, Alex's residence was shot on failed municipal architecture and the name "Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North" alludes to socialist-style housing.

When the new right-wing government takes power, the atmosphere is certainly more authoritarian than the anarchist air of the beginning. Kubrick's response to Ciment's question remained ambiguous as to what kind of society it is. Kubrick asserted that the film held comparisons between both ends of the political spectrum and that there is little difference between the two. Kubrick stated: "The Minister, played by Anthony Sharp, is clearly a figure of the Right. The writer, Patrick Magee, is a lunatic of the Left... They differ only in their dogma. Their means and ends are hardly distinguishable."

Anthony Burgess sold the film rights of his novel for US$500 (equivalent to $4,800 in 2022), shortly after its publication in 1962. Originally, the film was projected to star the rock band The Rolling Stones, with the band's lead singer Mick Jagger expressing interest in playing the lead role of Alex, and British filmmaker Ken Russell attached to direct. However, this never came to fruition due to problems with the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), and the rights ultimately fell to Kubrick.

McDowell was chosen for the role of Alex after Kubrick saw him in the film (1968). When asking why he was picked for the role, Kubrick told him: "You can exude intelligence on the screen." He also helped Kubrick on the uniform of Alex's gang, when he showed Kubrick the cricket whites he had. Kubrick asked him to put the box (jockstrap) not under but on top of the costume.

During the filming of the Ludovico technique scene, McDowell scratched a cornea and was temporarily blinded. The doctor standing next to him in the scene, dropping saline solution into Alex's forced-open eyes, was a real physician present to prevent the actor's eyes from drying. McDowell also cracked some ribs filming the humiliation stage show. A unique special effect technique was used when Alex jumps out of the window in a suicide attempt, showing the camera approaching the ground from Alex's point of view. This effect was achieved by dropping a Newman-Sinclair clockwork camera in a box, lens-first, from the third storey of the Corus Hotel. To Kubrick's surprise, the camera survived six takes.

The cinematic adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (1962) was not initially planned. Screenplay writer Terry Southern gave Kubrick a copy of the novel, but, as he was developing a Napoleon Bonaparte-related project, Kubrick put it aside. Kubrick's wife, in an interview, said she had given Kubrick the novel after having read it. Kubrick said: "I was excited by everything about it: the plot, the ideas, the characters, and, of course, the language. The story functions, of course, on several levels: political, sociological, philosophical, and, what's most important, on a dreamlike psychological-symbolic level." Kubrick wrote a screenplay faithful to the novel, saying: "I think whatever Burgess had to say about the story was said in the book, but I did invent a few useful narrative ideas and reshape some of the scenes." Kubrick based the script on the shortened US edition of the book, which omitted the final chapter.

Thamesmead South Housing Estate where Alex knocks his rebellious droogs into the lake

Kubrick was a perfectionist who researched meticulously, with thousands of photographs taken of potential locations, and many scene takes. He was so meticulous that McDowell stated: "If Kubrick hadn't been a film director he'd have been a General Chief of Staff of the US Forces. No matter what it is-even if it's a question of buying a shampoo it goes through him. He just likes total control." Filming took place between September 1970 and April 1971. Technically, to achieve and convey the fantastic, dream-like quality of the story, he filmed with extreme wide-angle lenses such as the Kinoptik Tegea 9.8 mm for 35 mm Arriflex cameras.

The main theme is an electronic arrangement of a short excerpt from Henry Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, and the soundtrack has two of Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance Marches.[citation needed ]

Alex is fanatical about Ludwig van Beethoven in general and his Ninth Symphony in particular, and the soundtrack includes an electronic version specially arranged by Wendy Carlos of the Scherzo and other parts of the Symphony. The soundtrack contains more music by Rossini than by Beethoven. The fast-motion sex scene with the two girls, the slow-motion fight between Alex and his Droogs, the fight with Billy Boy's gang, the drive to the writer's home ("playing 'hogs of the road'"), the invasion of the Cat Lady's home, and the scene in which Alex looks into the river and contemplates suicide before being approached by the beggar are all accompanied by Rossini's William Tell Overture or The Thieving Magpie Overture.

Original trailer for A Clockwork Orange

On release, A Clockwork Orange was met with mixed reviews. Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised the film: "McDowell is splendid as tomorrow's child, but it is always Mr. Kubrick's picture, which is even technically more interesting than 2001. Among other devices, Mr. Kubrick constantly uses what I assume to be a wide-angle lens to distort space relationships within scenes, so that the disconnection between lives, and between people and environment, becomes an actual, literal fact." The following year, after the film won the New York Film Critics Award, he called it "a brilliant and dangerous work, but it is dangerous in a way that brilliant things sometimes are". The film also had notable detractors. Film critic Stanley Kauffmann commented, "Inexplicably, the script leaves out Burgess' reference to the title". Roger Ebert gave A Clockwork Orange two stars out of four, calling it an "ideological mess". In her New Yorker review titled "Stanley Strangelove", Pauline Kael called it pornographic because of how it dehumanised Alex's victims while highlighting the sufferings of the protagonist. Kael noted the Billyboy's gang extended stripping of the woman they intended to rape, claiming it was offered for titillation.

In a retrospective review, Leslie Halliwell described it as "A repulsive film in which intellectuals have found acres of social and political meaning; the average judgement is likely to remain that it is pretentious and nasty rubbish for sick minds who do not mind jazzed-up images and incoherent sound."[citation needed ]

John Simon noted that the novel's most ambitious effects were based on language and the alienating effect of the narrator's Nadsat slang, making it a poor choice for a film. Concurring with some of Kael's criticisms about the depiction of Alex's victims, Simon noted that the character of Mr Alexander, who was young and likeable in the novel, was played by Patrick Magee, "a very quirky and middle-aged actor who specialises in being repellent". Simon comments further that "Kubrick over-directs the basically excessive Magee until his eyes erupt like missiles from their silos and his face turns every shade of a Technicolor sunset".

Over the years, A Clockwork Orange gained a status as a cult classic. For The Guardian, Philip French stated that the film's controversial reputation likely stemmed from the fact that it was released during a time when fear of teenage delinquency was high. Adam Nayman of wrote that the film's themes of delinquency, corrupt power structures and dehumanisation are relevant in today's society. Simon Braund of praised the "dazzling visual style" and McDowell's "simply astonishing" portrayal of Alex. Roger Ebert softened on the film years after first viewing it, declaring on his talk show that while he still thought the film had "all head and no heart", he felt Kubrick's detachments from the violence more so than he did in the first viewing.

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 88% based on 80 reviews, with an average rating of 8.8/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Disturbing and thought-provoking, A Clockwork Orange is a cold, dystopian nightmare with a very dark sense of humor". Metacritic gives the film a score of 77 out of 100, based on reviews by 21 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

The film was a box-office success, grossing $41 million in the United States and about $73 million overseas for a worldwide total of $114 million on a budget of $1.3 million.

The film was also successful in the United Kingdom, playing for over a year at the Warner West End in London. After two years of release, the film had earned Warner Bros. rentals of $2.5 million in the United Kingdom and was the number three film for 1973 behind Live and Let Die and The Godfather.

The film was the most popular film of 1972 in France with 7,611,745 admissions.

The film was re-released in North America in 1973 and earned $1.5 million in rentals.

American version

In the United States, A Clockwork Orange was given an X rating in its original release in 1972. Later, Kubrick replaced approximately 30 seconds of sexually explicit footage from two scenes with less explicit action to obtain an R rating re-release later in 1972.

Because of the explicit sex and violence, The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures rated it C ("condemned"), a rating which recommended against Roman Catholics seeing the film. In 1982, the office abolished the "condemned" rating. Subsequently, films deemed to have unacceptable levels of sex and violence by the Conference of Bishops are rated O, "morally offensive".

British withdrawal

Although it was passed uncut for UK cinemas in December 1971, British authorities considered the sexual violence in the film to be extreme. In March 1972, during the trial of a 14-year-old boy accused of the manslaughter of a classmate, the prosecutor referred to A Clockwork Orange, suggesting that the film had a macabre relevance to the case. The film was linked to the murder of an elderly vagrant by a 16-year-old boy in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, who pleaded guilty after telling police that friends had told him of the film "and the beating up of an old boy like this one". Roger Gray, for the defence, told the court that "the link between this crime and sensational literature, particularly A Clockwork Orange, is established beyond reasonable doubt". The press also blamed the film for a rape in which the attackers sang " Singin' in the Rain" as "Singin' in the Rape". Christiane Kubrick, the director's wife, has said that the family received threats and had protesters outside their home.

The film was withdrawn from British release in 1973 by Warner Bros at the request of Kubrick. In response to allegations that the film was responsible for copycat violence Kubrick stated:

To try and fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around. Art consists of reshaping life, but it does not create life, nor cause life. Furthermore, to attribute powerful suggestive qualities to a film is at odds with the scientifically accepted view that, even after deep hypnosis in a posthypnotic state, people cannot be made to do things which are at odds with their natures.

The Scala Cinema Club went into receivership in 1993 after losing a legal battle following an unauthorised screening of the film. In the same year, Channel 4 broadcast Forbidden Fruit, a 27-minute documentary about the withdrawal of the film in Britain. It contains footage from A Clockwork Orange. It was difficult to see A Clockwork Orange in the United Kingdom for 27 years. It was only after Kubrick died in 1999 that the film was re-released theatrically, on VHS, and on DVD. On 4 July 2001, the uncut version premiered on Sky TV's Sky Box Office, where it ran until mid-September.

Censorship in other countries

In Ireland, the film was banned on 10 April 1973. Warner Bros. decided against appealing the decision. Eventually, the film was passed uncut for cinema on 13 December 1999 and released on 17 March 2000. The re-release poster, a replica of the original British version, was rejected due to the words "ultra-violence" and "rape" in the tagline. Head censor Sheamus Smith explained his rejection to The Irish Times: "I believe that the use of those words in the context of advertising would be offensive and inappropriate."

In Singapore, the film was banned for over 30 years, before an attempt at release was made in 2006. However, the submission for an M18 rating was rejected, and the ban was not lifted. The ban was later lifted and the film was shown uncut (with an R21 rating) on 28 October 2011, as part of the Perspectives Film Festival.

In South Africa, it was banned under the apartheid regime for 13 years, then in 1984 was released with one cut and only made available to people over the age of 21. It was banned in South Korea and in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Nova Scotia. The Maritime Film Classification Board also reversed the ban eventually. Both jurisdictions now grant an R rating to the film.

In Brazil, the film was banned under the military dictatorship until 1978, when the film was released in a version with black dots covering the genitals and breasts of the actors in the nude scenes.

In Spain, the film debuted at the 1975 Valladolid International Film Festival under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. It was expected to be screened in the University of Valladolid but, due to student protests, the university had been closed for two months. The final screenings were in the commercial festival venues, with long queues of expectant students. After the festival, the film went into the arthouse circuit and later in commercial cinemas successfully.

In Malta, a ban on the film was lifted in 2000, when it was shown in local cinemas for the first time. The film was brought up during the compilation of evidence on the rape and murder of Paulina Dembska, which took place on 2 January 2022 in Sliema, for the accused attacker compared himself to Alex during police interrogation.

Novelist's response

Burgess had mixed reception about the film adaptation of his novel, publicly saying he loved Malcolm McDowell and Michael Bates, and the use of music. He praised it as so "brilliant" that it might be dangerous. He was concerned that it lacked the novel's redemptive final chapter, an absence he blamed upon his American publisher and not Kubrick. All US editions of the novel prior to 1986 omit the final chapter. Kubrick called the missing chapter "an extra chapter" and claimed that he had not read the original version until he had virtually finished the screenplay, and that he had never seriously considered using it. In Kubrick's opinion - as in the opinion of other readers, including the original American editor - the final chapter was unconvincing and inconsistent with the book.

Burgess reports in his autobiography You've Had Your Time (1990) that he and Kubrick at first enjoyed a good relationship, each holding similar philosophical and political views and each very interested in literature, cinema, music, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Burgess's novel Napoleon Symphony (1974) was dedicated to Kubrick. Their relationship soured when Kubrick left Burgess to defend the film from accusations of glorifying violence. A lapsed Catholic, Burgess tried many times to explain the Christian moral points of the story to outraged Christian organisations and to defend it against newspaper accusations that it supported fascist dogma. He also went to receive awards given to Kubrick on his behalf. He was in no way involved in the production of the film. The only profit he made directly from the film was the initial $500 that had been given to him for the rights to the adaptation.[citation needed ]

Burgess's own stage adaptation of the novel, A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music (1984), contains a direct reference to Kubrick. In the final moment of the play Alex joins in a song with the other characters. In the script's stage directions it states that while this happens: "A man bearded like Stanley Kubrick comes on playing, in exquisite counterpoint, ' Singin' in the Rain' on the trumpet. He is kicked off the stage."

Kubrick's film is relatively faithful to the Burgess novel, omitting only the final, positive chapter, in which Alex matures and outgrows sociopathy. While the film ends with Alex being offered an open-ended government job, implying he remains a sociopath at heart, the novel ends with Alex's positive change in character. This plot discrepancy occurred because Kubrick based his screenplay on the novel's American edition, in which the final chapter had been deleted on the insistence of its American publisher. He claimed not to have read the complete, original version of the novel until he had almost finished writing the screenplay, and that he never considered using it. The introduction to the 1996 edition of A Clockwork Orange says that Kubrick found the end of the original edition too blandly optimistic and unrealistic.

Critic Randy Rasmussen has argued that the government in the film is in a shambolic state of desperation, whereas the government in the novel is quite strong and self-confident. The former reflects Kubrick's preoccupation with the theme of acts of self-interest masked as simply following procedure.
One example of this would be differences in the portrayal of P. R. Deltoid, Alex's "post-corrective advisor". In the novel, P. R. Deltoid appears to have some moral authority (although not enough to prevent Alex from lying to him or engaging in crime, despite his protests). In the film, Deltoid is slightly sadistic and seems to have a sexual interest in Alex, interviewing him in his parents' bedroom and smacking him in the crotch.

In the film, Alex has a pet snake. There is no mention of this in the novel.

In the film Alex's prison number is 655321, in the book his prisoner number is 6655321.

In the novel, F. Alexander recognises Alex through several careless references to the previous attack (such as his wife then claiming they did not have a telephone). In the film, Alex is recognised when singing the song 'Singing in the Rain' in the bath, which he had hauntingly done while attacking F. Alexander's wife. The song does not appear at all in the book, as it was an improvisation by actor Malcolm McDowell when Kubrick complained that the rape scene was too "stiff".

In the US, the film has been widely available on home video since 1980 and was re-released several times on VHS. It was first released on DVD in the US on 29 June 1999.

In the UK, the film was eventually released by Warner Home Video on 13 November 2000 (on both VHS and DVD), individually and as part of The Stanley Kubrick Collection DVD set. Due to negative comments from fans, Warner Bros re-released the film, its image digitally restored and its soundtrack remastered. A limited-edition collector's set with a soundtrack disc, film poster, booklet, and filmstrip followed, and was discontinued. In 2005, a British re-release, packaged as an "Iconic Film" in a limited-edition slipcase was published, identical to the remastered DVD set, except for different package cover art. In 2006, Warner Bros announced the September publication of a two-disc special edition featuring a Malcolm McDowell commentary, and the releases of other two-disc sets of Stanley Kubrick films. Several British retailers had set the release date as 6 November 2006. The release was delayed and re-announced for the 2007 Holiday Season.

An HD DVD, Blu-ray, and DVD version was re-released on 23 October 2007, alongside four other Kubrick classics, with 1080p video transfers and remixed Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (for HD DVD) and uncompressed 5.1 PCM (for Blu-ray) audio tracks. Unlike the previous version, the DVD re-release edition is anamorphically enhanced. The Blu-ray was reissued for the 40th anniversary of the film's release, identical to the previously released Blu-ray, plus a Digibook and the Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures documentary as a bonus feature.

In 2021, a 4K restoration was completed with Kubrick's former assistant Leon Vitali working closely with Warner Bros. It was released in the US on 21 September 2021 and 4 October 2021 in the UK.

Along with Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Wild Bunch (1969), Soldier Blue (1970), Dirty Harry (1971), and (1971), the film is considered a landmark in the relaxation of control on violence in cinema.

A Clockwork Orange remains an influential work in cinema and other media. The film is frequently referenced in popular culture, which Adam Chandler of The Atlantic attributes to Kubrick's "genre-less" directing techniques that brought novel innovation in filming, music, and production that had not been seen at the time of the film's original release.

The Village Voice ranked A Clockwork Orange at number 112 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics. The film appears several times on the American Film Institute's (AFI) top movie lists. The film was listed at No. 46 in the 1998 AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies, at No. 70 in the 2007 second listing. "Alex DeLarge" is listed 12th in the villains section of the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains. In 2008, the AFI's 10 Top 10 rated A Clockwork Orange as the 4th greatest science-fiction movie to date. The film was also placed 21st in the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills

In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the world's greatest films, A Clockwork Orange was ranked 75th in the directors' poll and 235th in the critics' poll. In 2010, magazine placed it 9th on their list of the Top 10 Ridiculously Violent Movies. In 2008, ranked it 37th on their list of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time", and in 2013, Empire ranked it 11th on their list of "The 100 Best British Films Ever". In 2010, The Guardian ranked the film 6th in its list of 25 greatest arthouse films. The Spanish director Luis Buñuel praised the film highly. He once said: " A Clockwork Orange is my current favourite. I was predisposed against the film. After seeing it, I realised it is only a movie about what the modern world really means".

A Clockwork Orange was added to the United States' National Film Registry in 2020 as a work considered to be "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant.

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A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 dystopian crime film adapted, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It employs disturbing, violent images to comment on psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, and other social, political, and economic subjects in a dystopian near-future Britain.

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A dystopia (from Ancient Greek δυσ (dus) ‘bad’, and τόπος (tópos) ‘place’), also called a cacotopia[2] or anti-utopia, is a speculated community or society that is undesirable or frightening.[3][4] It is often treated as an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Sir Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence, and poverty. The relationship between utopia and dystopia is in actuality, not one simple opposition, as many utopian elements and components are found in dystopias as well, and vice versa.[5][6][7]

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The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction action film written and directed by the Wachowskis. It is the first installment in the Matrix film series, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving and Joe Pantoliano, and depicts a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside the Matrix, a simulated reality that intelligent machines have created to distract humans while using their bodies as an energy source. When computer programmer Thomas Anderson, under the hacker alias " Neo", uncovers the truth, he joins a rebellion against the machines along with other people who have been freed from the Matrix.

The Matrix is an example of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. The Wachowskis' approach to action scenes was influenced by anime and martial arts films (particularly fight choreographers and wire fu techniques from Hong Kong action cinema); other influences include Plato's cave and 1990s Telnet hacker communities. The film popularized terms such as the red pill, and introduced a visual effect known as " bullet time", in which the heightened perception of certain characters is represented by allowing the action within a shot to progress in slow motion while the camera appears to move through the scene at normal speed, allowing the sped-up movements of certain characters to be perceived normally.

The Matrix opened in theaters in the United States on March 31, 1999, to widespread acclaim from critics, who praised its innovative visual effects, action sequences, cinematography and entertainment value. The film was a box office success, grossing over $460 million on a $63 million budget, becoming the highest-grossing Warner Bros. film of 1999 and the fourth-highest-grossing film of that year. The film received nominations at the 72nd Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Sound and Best Sound Editing, winning all four categories. The film was also the recipient of numerous other accolades, including Best Sound and Best Special Visual Effects at the 53rd British Academy Film Awards, and the Wachowskis were awarded Best Director and Best Science Fiction Film at the 26th Saturn Awards. The Matrix is considered to be among the greatest science fiction films of all time, and in 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant."

The film's success led to two feature film sequels being released in 2003, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, which were also written and directed by the Wachowskis. The Matrix franchise was further expanded through the production of comic books, video games and an animated anthology film, The Animatrix, with which the Wachowskis were heavily involved. The franchise has also inspired books and theories expanding on some of the religious and philosophical ideas alluded to in the films. A fourth film, titled The Matrix Resurrections, was released on December 22, 2021.

At an abandoned hotel, a police squad corners Trinity, who overpowers them with superhuman abilities. She flees, pursued by the police and a group of suited Agents capable of similar superhuman feats. She answers a ringing public telephone and vanishes.

Computer programmer Thomas Anderson, known by his hacking alias " Neo", is puzzled by repeated online encounters with the phrase "the Matrix". Trinity contacts him and tells him a man named Morpheus has the answers Neo seeks. A team of Agents and police, led by Agent Smith, arrives at Neo's workplace in search of him. Though Morpheus attempts to guide Neo to safety, Neo surrenders rather than risk a dangerous escape. The Agents offer to erase Neo's criminal record in exchange for his help with locating Morpheus, who they claim is a terrorist. When Neo refuses to cooperate, they fuse his mouth shut, pin him down, and implant a robotic "bug" in his abdomen. Neo wakes up from what he believes to be a nightmare. Soon after, Neo is taken by Trinity to meet Morpheus, and she removes the bug from Neo.

Morpheus offers Neo a choice between two pills: red to reveal the truth about the Matrix, or blue to make Neo forget everything and return to his former life. Neo takes the red pill, and his reality begins to distort until he awakes in a liquid-filled pod among countless other pods, containing other humans. He is then brought aboard Morpheus's flying ship, the Nebuchadnezzar. As Neo recuperates from a lifetime of physical inactivity in the pod, Morpheus explains the history: in the early 21st century, humanity had developed intelligent machines before war broke out between two sides. After humans blocked the machines' access to solar energy, the machines responded by enslaving humankind and harvesting their bioelectric power while keeping their minds pacified in the Matrix, a shared simulated reality modeled on the world as it was in 1999. In the years following, the remaining free humans took refuge in the underground city of Zion.

Morpheus and his crew are a group of rebels who hack into the Matrix to "unplug" enslaved humans and recruit them; their understanding of the Matrix's simulated nature allows them to bend its physical laws. Morpheus warns Neo that death within the Matrix kills the physical body too and explains that the Agents are sentient programs that eliminate threats to the system, while machines called Sentinels eliminate rebels in the real world. Neo's prowess during virtual training cements Morpheus's belief that Neo is "the One", a human prophesied to free humankind. The group enters the Matrix to visit the Oracle, a prophet-like program who predicted that the One would emerge. She implies to Neo that he is not the One and warns that he will have to choose between Morpheus's life and his own. Before they can leave the Matrix, Agents and police ambush the group, tipped off by Cypher, a disgruntled crew member who has betrayed Morpheus in exchange for a deal to be plugged back into the Matrix to live a comfortable life.

To buy time for the others, Morpheus fights Smith and is captured. Cypher exits the Matrix and murders the other crew members as they lie unconscious. Before Cypher can kill Neo and Trinity, crew member Tank regains consciousness and kills him before pulling Neo and Trinity from the Matrix. The Agents interrogate Morpheus to learn his access codes to the mainframe computer in Zion, which would allow them to destroy it. Neo resolves to return to the Matrix to rescue Morpheus, as the Oracle prophesied; Trinity insists she accompany him. While rescuing Morpheus, Neo gains confidence in his abilities, performing feats comparable to those of the Agents.

After Morpheus and Trinity safely exit the Matrix, Smith ambushes and appears to kill Neo. While a group of Sentinels attack the Nebuchadnezzar, Trinity confesses her love for Neo and says the Oracle told her she would fall in love with the One. Neo is revived, with newfound abilities to perceive and control the Matrix; he easily defeats Smith, prompting the other Agents to flee and he leaves the Matrix just as the ship's electromagnetic pulse disables the Sentinels. Back in the Matrix, Neo makes a telephone call, promising the machines that he will show their prisoners "a world where anything is possible", before he hangs up and flies away.

Keanu Reeves as Neo: A computer programmer, born Thomas A. Anderson, who secretly operates as a hacker named Neo. Reeves described his character as someone who felt that something was wrong, and was searching for Morpheus and the truth to break free. Will Smith turned down the role of Neo to make Wild Wild West, because of skepticism over the film's ambitious bullet time special effects. He later stated he was "not mature enough as an actor" at that time, and that if given the role, he "would have messed it up". Smith praised Reeves for his portrayal. Nicolas Cage also turned down the part because of "family obligations". Warner Bros. sought Brad Pitt or Val Kilmer for the role. When both declined, Leonardo DiCaprio initially accepted the role, but ultimately turned it down because he did not want to do a visual effects film directly after . The studio pushed for Reeves, who won the role over Johnny Depp, the Wachowskis' first choice. Lorenzo di Bonaventura stated that the screenplay was also sent to Sandra Bullock, with the suggestion of rewriting Neo as a female.

Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus: A human freed from the Matrix and captain of the Nebuchadnezzar. Fishburne stated that once he read the script, he did not understand why other people found it confusing. However, he doubted if the movie would ever be made, because it was "so smart". The Wachowskis instructed Fishburne to base his performance on the character Morpheus in Neil Gaiman's comics. Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson and Val Kilmer were also considered for the part.

Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity: A human freed by Morpheus, a crewmember of the Nebuchadnezzar, and later Neo's romantic interest. After reading the script, Moss stated that at first, she did not believe she had to do the extreme acrobatic actions as described in the script. She also doubted how the Wachowskis would get to direct a movie with a budget so large, but after spending an hour with them going through the storyboard, she understood why some people would trust them. Moss mentioned that she underwent a three-hour physical test during casting, so she knew what to expect subsequently. The role made Moss, who later said, "I had no career before. None." Janet Jackson was initially approached for the role but scheduling conflicts prevented her from accepting it. In an interview, she stated that turning down the role was difficult for her, so she later referenced The Matrix in the 'Intro' and 'Outro' interludes on her tenth studio album Discipline. Sandra Bullock, who was previously approached for the role of Neo, was also offered the role of Trinity, but she turned it down. Rosie Perez, Salma Hayek and Jada Pinkett Smith (who would later play Niobe in the sequels) auditioned for the role.

Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith: A sentient "Agent" program of the Matrix whose purpose is to destroy Zion and stop humans from getting out of the Matrix. Unlike other Agents, he has ambitions to free himself from his duties. Weaving stated that he found the character amusing and enjoyable to play. He developed a neutral accent but with more specific character for the role. He wanted Smith to sound neither robotic nor human, and also said that the Wachowskis' voices had influenced his voice in the film. When filming began, Weaving mentioned that he was excited to be a part of something that would extend him. Jean Reno was offered the role, but declined, unwilling to move to Australia for the production.

Joe Pantoliano as Cypher: Another human freed by Morpheus, and a crewmember of the Nebuchadnezzar, but one who regrets taking the red pill and seeks to be returned to the Matrix, later betraying the rebels to Agent Smith. Pantoliano had worked with the Wachowskis prior to appearing in The Matrix, starring in their 1996 film .

Marcus Chong as Tank: The "operator" of the Nebuchadnezzar and Dozer's brother; they are both "natural" (as opposed to bred) humans, born outside of the Matrix.

Matt Doran as Mouse: A freed human and a programmer on the Nebuchadnezzar.

Rowan Witt as The Spoon Boy, a young prophet who has learnt how to manipulate the world of the Matrix. Seemingly wise beyond his years, he teaches Neo how to develop his powers and provides him with wisdom and motivation across the films and graphic novels.

Gloria Foster as The Oracle: A prophet who still resides in the Matrix, helping the freed humans with her foresight and wisdom.

Anthony Ray Parker as Dozer: Pilot of the Nebuchadnezzar. He is Tank's brother, and like him was born outside of the Matrix.

Julian Arahanga as Apoc: A freed human and a crew member on the Nebuchadnezzar.

Belinda McClory as Switch: A human freed by Morpheus, and a crew member of the Nebuchadnezzar.

Paul Goddard as Agent Brown: One of two sentient "Agent" programs in the Matrix, who works with Agent Smith to destroy Zion and stop humans from escaping the system.

Robert Taylor as Agent Jones: One of two sentient "Agent" programs in the Matrix who works with Agent Smith to destroy Zion and stop humans from escaping the system.

Ada Nicodemou as DuJour: A reference to the White Rabbit in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

In 1994, the Wachowskis presented the script for the film to Warner Bros. Pictures. After Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the president of production of the company at the time, read the script, he decided to buy rights to it and included two more pictures, and The Matrix, in the contract. The first movie the Wachowskis directed, Bound, then became a critical success. Using this momentum, they later asked to direct The Matrix. Reeves said that the Matrix avatar would have been a "different sex than the Zion reality" in the early draft of the script, but the studio wasn't ready for that version.

In 1996, the Wachowskis pitched the role of Neo to Will Smith. Smith explained on his YouTube channel that the idea was for him to be Neo, while Morpheus was to be played by Val Kilmer. He later explained that he did not quite understand the concept and he turned down the role to instead film Wild Wild West.

Producer Joel Silver soon joined the project. Although the project had key supporters, including Silver and Di Bonaventura, to influence the company, The Matrix was still a huge investment for Warner Bros., which had to invest $60 million to create a movie with prominent actors and difficult special effects. The Wachowskis therefore hired underground comic book artists Geof Darrow and Steve Skroce to draw a 600-page, shot-by-shot storyboard for the entire film. The storyboard eventually earned the studio's approval, and it was decided to film in Australia to make the most of the budget. Soon, The Matrix became a co-production of Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures. According to editor Zach Staenberg on the DVD audio commentary track, the production team sent an edit of the film's first minutes (featuring Trinity's encounter with police and Agents) to Warner executives, and secured Warner's "total support of the movie" from then on.

The cast were required to be able to understand and explain The Matrix. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation was required reading for most of the principal cast and crew. In early 1997, the Wachowskis had Reeves read Simulacra and Simulation, Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, and Dylan Evans's ideas on evolutionary psychology even before they opened up the script, and eventually he was able to explain all the philosophical nuances involved. Moss commented that she had difficulty with this process.

The directors had long been admirers of Hong Kong action cinema, so they decided to hire the Chinese martial arts choreographer and film director Yuen Woo-ping to work on fight scenes. To prepare for the wire fu, the actors had to train hard for several months. The Wachowskis first scheduled four months for training, beginning in October 1997. Yuen was optimistic but then began to worry when he realized how unfit the actors were.

Yuen let their body style develop and then worked with each actor's strength. He built on Reeves's diligence, Fishburne's resilience, Weaving's precision and Moss's feminine grace. Yuen designed Moss's moves to suit her deftness and lightness. Prior to the pre-production, Reeves underwent a two-level fusion of his cervical (neck) spine due to spinal cord compression from a herniated disc ("I was falling over in the shower in the morning"). He was still recovering by the time of pre-production, but he insisted on training, so Yuen let him practice punches and lighter moves. Reeves trained hard and even requested training on days off. However, the surgery still made him unable to kick for two out of four months of training. As a result, Reeves did not kick much in the film. Weaving had to undergo hip surgery after he sustained an injury during the training process.

All but a few scenes were filmed at Fox Studios in Sydney, as well as in the city itself, although recognizable landmarks were not included to maintain the impression of a generic American city. The filming helped establish New South Wales as a major film production center. Filming began in March 1998 and wrapped in August 1998; principal photography took 118 days. Some filming also occurred at Culver Studios.

Due to Reeves's neck injury (see above), some of the action scenes had to be rescheduled to wait for his full recovery. As a result, the filming began with scenes that did not require much physical exertion, such as the scene in Thomas Anderson's office, the interrogation room, or the car ride in which Neo is taken to see the Oracle. Locations for these scenes included Martin Place's fountain in Sydney, halfway between it and the adjacent Colonial Building, and the Colonial Building itself. During the scene set on a government building rooftop, the team filmed extra footage of Neo dodging bullets in case the bullet time process did not work. The bullet-time fight scene was filmed on the roof of Symantec Corporation building in Kent Street, opposite Sussex Street.

Moss performed the shots featuring Trinity at the beginning of the film and all the wire stunts herself. The rooftop set that Trinity uses to escape from Agent Brown early in the film was left over from the production of , which has prompted comments due to the thematic similarities of the films. During the rehearsal of the lobby scene, in which Trinity runs on a wall, Moss injured her leg and was ultimately unable to film the shot in one take. She stated that she was under a lot of pressure at the time and was devastated when she realized that she would be unable to do it.

Fishburne later said that while being in Sydney to shoot the film, he experienced a racist vibe and that it felt like America in the 1950s.

The dojo set was built well before the actual filming. During the filming of these action sequences, there was significant physical contact between the actors, earning them bruises. Reeves's injury and his insufficient training with wires prior to filming meant he was unable to perform the triple kicks satisfactorily and became frustrated with himself, causing the scene to be postponed. The scene was shot successfully a few days later, with Reeves using only three takes. Yuen altered the choreography and made the actors pull their punches in the last sequence of the scene, creating a training feel.

The filmmakers originally planned to shoot the subway scene in an actual subway station, but the complexity of the fight and related wire work required shooting the scene on a set. The set was built around an existing train storage facility, which had real train tracks. Filming the scene when Neo slammed Smith into the ceiling, Chad Stahelski, Reeves's stunt double, sustained several injuries, including broken ribs, knees and a dislocated shoulder. Another stuntman was injured by a hydraulic puller during a shot in which Neo was slammed into a booth. The office building in which Smith interrogated Morpheus was a large set, and the outside view from inside the building was a large, three story high cyclorama. The helicopter was a full-scale, light-weight mock-up suspended by a wire rope operated a tilting mechanism mounted to the studio roofbeams. The helicopter had a real minigun side-mounted to it, which was set to cycle at half its regular (3,000 rounds per minute) firing rate.

To prepare for the scene in which Neo wakes up in a pod, Reeves lost 15 pounds (7 kg) and shaved his whole body to give Neo an emaciated look. The scene in which Neo fell into the sewer system concluded the principal photography. According to The Art of the Matrix, at least one filmed scene and a variety of short pieces of action were omitted from the final cut of the film.

Dane A. Davis was responsible for creating the sound effects for the film. The fight scene sound effects, such as the whipping sounds of punches, were created using thin metal rods and recording them, then editing the sounds. The sound of the pod containing a human body closing required almost fifty sounds put together.

The film's score was composed by Don Davis. He noted that mirrors appear frequently in the film: reflections of the blue and red pills are seen in Morpheus's glasses; Neo's capture by Agents is viewed through the rear-view mirror of Trinity's motorcycle; Neo observes a broken mirror mending itself; reflections warp as a spoon is bent; the reflection of a helicopter is visible as it approaches a skyscraper. Davis focused on this theme of reflections when creating his score, alternating between sections of the orchestra and attempting to incorporate contrapuntal ideas. Davis' score combines orchestral, choral and synthesizer elements; the balance between these elements varies depending on whether humans or machines are the dominant subject of a given scene. In addition to Davis' score, The Matrix soundtrack also features music from acts such as Rammstein, Rob Dougan, Rage Against the Machine, Propellerheads, Ministry, Lunatic Calm, Deftones, Monster Magnet, The Prodigy, Rob Zombie, Meat Beat Manifesto and Marilyn Manson.

In the film, the code that composes the Matrix itself is frequently represented as downward-flowing green characters. This code uses a custom typeface designed by Simon Whiteley, which includes mirror images of half-width kana characters and Western Latin letters and Arabic numerals. In a 2017 interview at CNET, he attributed the design to his wife, who is from Japan, and added, "I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes". "The color green reflects the green tint commonly used on early monochrome computer monitors". Lynne Cartwright, the Visual Effects Supervisor at Animal Logic, supervised the creation of the film's opening title sequence, as well as the general look of the Matrix code throughout the film, in collaboration with Lindsay Fleay and Justen Marshall. The portrayal resembles the opening credits of the 1995 Japanese cyberpunk film, Ghost in the Shell, which had a strong influence on the Matrix series. It was also used in the subsequent films, on the related website, and in the game The Matrix: Path of Neo, and its drop-down effect is reflected in the design of some posters for the Matrix series. The code received the Runner-up Award in the 1999 Jesse Garson Award for In-film typography or opening credit sequence.

The Matrix's production designer, Owen Paterson, used methods to distinguish the "real world" and the Matrix in a pervasive way. The production design team generally placed a bias towards the Matrix code's distinctive green color in scenes set within the simulation, whereas there is an emphasis on the color blue during scenes set in the "real world". In addition, the Matrix scenes' sets were slightly more decayed, monolithic and grid-like, to convey the cold, logical and artificial nature of that environment. For the "real world", the actors' hair was less styled, their clothing had more textile content, and the cinematographers used longer lenses to soften the backgrounds and emphasize the actors.

The Nebuchadnezzar was designed to have a patched-up look, instead of clean, cold and sterile space ship interior sets as used on productions such as . The wires were made visible to show the ship's working internals, and each composition was carefully designed to convey the ship as "a marriage between Man and Machine". For the scene when Neo wakes up in the pod connected to the Matrix, the pod was constructed to look dirty, used and sinister. During the testing of a breathing mechanism in the pod, the tester suffered hypothermia in under eight minutes, so the pod had to be heated.

Kym Barrett, costume designer, said that she defined the characters and their environment by their costume. For example, Reeves's office costume was designed for Thomas Anderson to look uncomfortable, disheveled and out of place. Barrett sometimes used three types of fabric for each costume, and also had to consider the practicality of the acting. The actors needed to perform martial art actions in their costume, hang upside-down without people seeing up their clothing, and be able to work the wires while strapped into the harnesses. For Trinity, Barrett experimented with how each fabric absorbed and reflected different types of light, and was eventually able to make Trinity's costume mercury-like and oil-slick to suit the character. For the Agents, their costume was designed to create a secret service, undercover look, resembling the film and classic men in black.

The sunglasses, a staple of the film's aesthetics, were commissioned for the film by designer Richard Walker from sunglasses maker Blinde Design.

The "bullet time" effect was created for the film. A scene would be computer-modeled to decide the positioning of the physical cameras. The actor then provided their performance in a chroma key setup, while the cameras were fired in rapid succession, with fractions of a second delay between each shot. The result was combined with CGI backgrounds to create the final effect at (0:33).

As for artistic inspiration for bullet time, I would credit Otomo Katsuhiro, who co-wrote and directed , which definitely blew me away, along with director Michel Gondry. His music videos experimented with a different type of technique called view-morphing and it was just part of the beginning of uncovering the creative approaches toward using still cameras for special effects. Our technique was significantly different because we built it to move around objects that were themselves in motion, and we were also able to create slow-motion events that 'virtual cameras' could move around-rather than the static action in Gondry's music videos with limited camera moves.

The film is known for popularizing a visual effect known as " bullet time", which allows a shot to progress in slow motion while the camera appears to move through the scene at normal speed. Bullet time has been described as "a visual analogy for privileged moments of consciousness within the Matrix", and throughout the film, the effect is used to illustrate characters' exertion of control over time and space. The Wachowskis first imagined an action sequence that slowed time while the camera pivoted rapidly around the subjects, and proposed the effect in their screenplay for the film. When John Gaeta read the script, he pleaded with an effects producer at Mass.Illusion to let him work on the project, and created a prototype that led to him becoming the film's visual effects supervisor.

The method used for creating these effects involved a technically expanded version of an old art photography technique known as time-slice photography, in which an array of cameras are placed around an object and triggered simultaneously. Each camera captures a still picture, contributing one frame to the video sequence, which creates the effect of "virtual camera movement"; the illusion of a viewpoint moving around an object that appears frozen in time.

The bullet time effect is similar but slightly more complicated, incorporating temporal motion so that rather than appearing totally frozen, the scene progresses in slow and variable motion. The cameras' positions and exposures were previsualized using a 3D simulation. Instead of firing the cameras simultaneously, the visual effect team fired the cameras fractions of a second after each other, so that each camera could capture the action as it progressed, creating a super slow-motion effect. When the frames were put together, the resulting slow-motion effects reached a frame frequency of 12,000 per second, as opposed to the normal 24 frames per second of film. Standard movie cameras were placed at the ends of the array to pick up the normal speed action before and after. Because the cameras circle the subject almost completely in most of the sequences, computer technology was used to edit out the cameras that appeared in the background on the other side. To create backgrounds, Gaeta hired George Borshukov, who created 3D models based on the geometry of buildings and used the photographs of the buildings themselves as texture.[citation needed ]

The photo-realistic surroundings generated by this method were incorporated into the bullet time scene, and algorithms based on optical flow were used to interpolate between the still images to produce a fluent dynamic motion; the computer-generated "lead in" and "lead out" slides were filled in between frames in sequence to get an illusion of orbiting the scene. Manex Visual Effects used a cluster farm running the Unix-like operating system FreeBSD to render many of the film's visual effects.

Manex also handled creature effects, such as Sentinels and machines in real world scenes; Animal Logic created the code hallway and the exploding Agent at the end of the film. DFilm managed scenes that required heavy use of digital compositing, such as Neo's jump off a skyscraper and the helicopter crash into a building. The ripple effect in the latter scene was created digitally, but the shot also included practical elements, and months of extensive research were needed to find the correct kind of glass and explosives to use. The scene was shot by colliding a quarter-scale helicopter mock-up into a glass wall wired to concentric rings of explosives; the explosives were then triggered in sequence from the center outward, to create a wave of exploding glass.

The photogrammetric and image-based computer-generated background approaches in The Matrix's bullet time evolved into innovations unveiled in the sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. The method of using real photographs of buildings as texture for 3D models eventually led the visual effect team to digitize all data, such as scenes, characters' motions and expressions. It also led to the development of "Universal Capture", a process which samples and stores facial details and expressions at high resolution. With these highly detailed collected data, the team were able to create virtual cinematography in which characters, locations and events can all be created digitally and viewed through virtual cameras, eliminating the restrictions of real cameras.

The Matrix was released on DVD and Laserdisc in its original aspect ratio of 2.39:1 on September 21, 1999, in the US from Warner Home Video as well as in 1.33:1 aspect ratio in Hong Kong from ERA Home Entertainment. It was also released on VHS in both full screen and widescreen formats followed on December 7, 1999. After its DVD release, it was the first DVD to sell more than one million copies in the US. By 2000, the film went on to become the first to sell more than three million copies in the US. At that point, it became the top-selling DVD release of all time, holding this record for a few months before being surpassed by . By November 10, 2003, one month after The Matrix Reloaded DVD was released, the sales of The Matrix DVD had exceeded 30 million copies. It then debuted on both VHS and DVD formats in the UK on November 29, 1999. The Matrix sold more than 107,000 DVD copies in just two weeks, breaking Armageddon's record for becoming the country's best-selling DVD title. The Ultimate Matrix Collection was released on HD DVD on May 22, 2007, and on Blu-ray on October 14, 2008. The film was also released standalone in a 10th-anniversary edition Blu-ray in the Digibook format on March 31, 2009, ten years to the day after the film was released theatrically. In 2010, the film had another DVD release along with the two sequels as The Complete Matrix Trilogy. It was also released on 4K HDR Blu-ray on May 22, 2018. The film as part of The Matrix Trilogy was released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on October 30, 2018.

The franchise also contains four video games: Enter the Matrix (2003), which contains footage shot specifically for the game and chronicles events taking place before and during The Matrix Reloaded; The Matrix Online (2004), an MMORPG which continued the story beyond The Matrix Revolutions; The Matrix: Path of Neo (2005), which focuses on Neo's journey through the trilogy of films; and The Matrix Awakens (2021), an interactive technology demonstration developed by using Unreal Engine 5.

The franchise also includes The Matrix Comics, a series of comics and short stories set in the world of The Matrix, written and illustrated by figures from the comics industry. Most of the comics were originally presented for free on the official Matrix website; they were later republished, along with some new material, in two printed trade paperback volumes, called The Matrix Comics, Vol 1 and Vol 2.

The Matrix grossed $27.8 million during its opening weekend, as well as earning $37.4 million in its first five days. It surpassed Lost in Space and Indecent Proposal for having the biggest April and Easter opening weekends. The film also had the second-highest opening weekend for a spring starter film, trailing only behind . Three years later in 2002, The Matrix's records for having the largest April and Easter opening weekends would be taken by The Scorpion King and . Upon its opening, it had the highest opening weekend of any 1999 film, easily topping . Additionally, this was the biggest opening weekend for a Keanu Reeves film since in 1994. It was also ranked number one at the box office ahead of Forces of Nature. The film would remain at the top of the box office for two weeks until it was overtaken by . During its fourth weekend, The Matrix briefly returned to the number one spot. The following week, the film would be displaced by Entrapment.

In its original run, the film earned $171,479,930 (37.0%) in the United States and Canada and $292,037,453 (63.0%) in other countries, for a worldwide total of $463,517,383. In North America, it went on to become the fifth highest-grossing film of 1999 and the highest-grossing R-rated film of that year. Worldwide, it was the fourth-highest-grossing film of the year, after Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, The Sixth Sense and . The Matrix became the second-highest-grossing Warner Bros. film of all time, behind . Overall, it was the third-highest-grossing R-rated film at the time, just after Saving Private Ryan and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Following re-releases, the worldwide gross of the film is $466,621,824. In 2012, it was placed 122nd on the list of highest-grossing films of all time, and the second-highest-grossing film in the Matrix franchise after The Matrix Reloaded ($742.1 million).

The Matrix was praised by many critics, as well as filmmakers, and authors of science fiction, especially for its "spectacular action" scenes and its "groundbreaking special effects". Some have described The Matrix as one of the best science fiction films of all time; Entertainment Weekly called The Matrix "the most influential action movie of the generation". There have also been those, including philosopher William Irwin, who have suggested that the film explores significant philosophical and spiritual themes. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 83% based on 207 reviews, with an average score of 7.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Thanks to the Wachowskis' imaginative vision, The Matrix is a smartly crafted combination of spectacular action and groundbreaking special effects". At Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received a score of 73 based on 35 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale. It ranked 323rd among critics, and 546th among directors, in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made.

Philip Strick commented in Sight & Sound, if the Wachowskis "claim no originality of message, they are startling innovators of method," praising the film's details and its "broadside of astonishing images". Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four: he praised the film's visuals and premise, but disliked the third act's focus on action. Similarly, praised the "entertainingly ingenious" switches between different realities, Hugo Weaving's "engagingly odd" performance, and the film's cinematography and production design, but concluded, "the promising premise is steadily wasted as the film turns into a fairly routine action pic ... yet another slice of overlong, high-concept hokum."

Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader reviewed the film negatively, criticizing it as "simpleminded fun for roughly the first hour, until the movie becomes overwhelmed by its many sources ... There's not much humor to keep it all life-size, and by the final stretch it's become bloated, mechanical, and tiresome."

Ian Nathan of described Carrie-Anne Moss as "a major find", praised the "surreal visual highs" enabled by the bullet time (or "flo-mo") effect, and described the film as "technically mind-blowing, style merged perfectly with content and just so damn cool". Nathan remarked that although the film's "looney plot" would not stand up to scrutiny, that was not a big flaw because " The Matrix is about pure experience". Maitland McDonagh said in her review for , the Wachowskis' "through-the-looking-glass plot... manages to work surprisingly well on a number of levels: as a dystopian sci-fi thriller, as a brilliant excuse for the film's lavish and hyperkinetic fight scenes, and as a pretty compelling call to the dead-above-the-eyeballs masses to unite and cast off their chains... This dazzling pop allegory is steeped in a dark, pulpy sensibility that transcends nostalgic pastiche and stands firmly on its own merits."

's reviewer Andrew O'Hehir acknowledged that although The Matrix is in his view a fundamentally immature and unoriginal film ("It lacks anything like adult emotion... all this pseudo-spiritual hokum, along with the over-ramped onslaught of special effects-some of them quite amazing-will hold 14-year-old boys in rapture, not to mention those of us of all ages and genders who still harbor a 14-year-old boy somewhere inside"), he concluded, "as in , there's an appealing scope and daring to the Wachowskis' work, and their eagerness for more plot twists and more crazy images becomes increasingly infectious. In a limited and profoundly geeky sense, this might be an important and generous film. The Wachowskis have little feeling for character or human interaction, but their passion for movies -for making them, watching them, inhabiting their world-is pure and deep."

Filmmakers and science fiction creators alike generally took a complimentary perspective of The Matrix. William Gibson, a key figure in cyberpunk fiction, called the film "an innocent delight I hadn't felt in a long time," and stated, "Neo is my favourite-ever science fiction hero, absolutely." Joss Whedon called the film "my number one" and praised its storytelling, structure and depth, concluding, "It works on whatever level you want to bring to it." Darren Aronofsky commented, "I walked out of The Matrix ... and I was thinking, 'What kind of science fiction movie can people make now?' The Wachowskis basically took all the great sci-fi ideas of the 20th century and rolled them into a delicious pop culture sandwich that everyone on the planet devoured." M. Night Shyamalan expressed admiration for the Wachowskis, stating, "Whatever you think of The Matrix, every shot is there because of the passion they have! You can see they argued it out!". Simon Pegg said that The Matrix provided "the excitement and satisfaction that The Phantom Menace failed to inspire. The Matrix seemed fresh and cool and visually breathtaking; making wonderful, intelligent use of CGI to augment the on-screen action, striking a perfect balance of the real and the hyperreal. It was possibly the coolest film I had ever seen." Quentin Tarantino counted The Matrix as one of his twenty favorite movies from 1992 to 2009. James Cameron called it "one of the most profoundly fresh science fiction films ever made". Christopher Nolan described it as "an incredibly palpable mainstream phenomenon that made people think, Hey, what if this isn't real?"

The Matrix received Academy Awards for Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects and Best Sound. The filmmakers were competing against other films with established franchises, like Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, yet they won all four of their nominations. The Matrix also received BAFTA awards for Best Sound and Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects, in addition to nominations in the cinematography, production design and editing categories. In 1999, it won Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film and Best Direction. In February 2022, the film was named one of the five finalists for Oscars Cheer Moment as part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' " Oscars Fan Favorite" contest, for the "bullet time" scene, finishing in fifth place.

The Matrix draws from and alludes to numerous cinematic and literary works, and concepts from mythology, religion and philosophy, including the ideas of Buddhism, Christianity, Gnosticism, Hinduism and Judaism.

The pods in which the machines keep humans have been compared to images in Metropolis, and the work of M. C. Escher. A resemblance to the eerie worlds of Swiss artist H.R. Giger was also recognized. The pods can be seen in Welcome to Paradox Episode 4 "News from D Street" from a 1986 short story of the same name by Andrew Weiner which aired on September 7, 1998, on the SYFY Channel and has a remarkably similar concept. In this episode the hero is unaware he is living in virtual reality until he is told so by "the code man" who created the simulation and enters it knowingly. The Wachowskis have described Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as a formative cinematic influence, and as a major inspiration on the visual style they aimed for when making The Matrix. Rainer Werner Fassbinders German TV Miniseries World on a Wire from 1973, an adaption of the novel Simulacron-3, served as inspirational source for some details of The Matrix, such as the transfer between the real world and the Matrix-simulation via telephone / phonebooth.[citation needed ] Reviewers have also commented on similarities between The Matrix and other late-1990s films such as Strange Days, and The Truman Show. The similarity of the film's central concept to a device in the long-running series has also been noted. As in the film, the Matrix of that series (introduced in the 1976 serial The Deadly Assassin) is a massive computer system which one enters using a device connecting to the head, allowing users to see representations of the real world and change its laws of physics; but if killed there, they will die in reality. The action scenes of The Matrix were also strongly influenced by live-action films such as those of director John Woo. The martial arts sequences were inspired by Fist of Legend, a critically acclaimed 1995 martial arts film starring Jet Li. The fight scenes in Fist of Legend led to the hiring of Yuen as fight choreographer.

The Wachowskis' approach to action scenes drew upon their admiration for Japanese animation such as Ninja Scroll and . Director Mamoru Oshii's 1995 animated film Ghost in the Shell was a particularly strong influence; producer Joel Silver has stated that the Wachowskis first described their intentions for The Matrix by showing him that anime and saying, "We wanna do that for real". Mitsuhisa Ishikawa of Production I.G, which produced Ghost in the Shell, noted that the anime's high-quality visuals were a strong source of inspiration for the Wachowskis. He also commented, "...cyberpunk films are very difficult to describe to a third person. I'd imagine that The Matrix is the kind of film that was very difficult to draw up a written proposal for to take to film studios". He stated that since Ghost in the Shell had gained recognition in America, the Wachowskis used it as a "promotional tool".

The film makes several references to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Comparisons have also been made to Grant Morrison's comic series The Invisibles, with Morrison describing it in 2011 as "(it) seemed to me (to be) my own combination of ideas enacted on the screen". Comparisons have also been made between The Matrix and the books of Carlos Castaneda.

The Matrix belongs to the cyberpunk genre of science fiction, and draws from earlier works in the genre such as the 1984 novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. For example, the film's use of the term "Matrix" is adopted from Gibson's novel, though L. P. Davies had already used the term "Matrix" fifteen years earlier for a similar concept in his 1969 novel The White Room ("It had been tried in the States some years earlier, but their 'matrix' as they called it hadn't been strong enough to hold the fictional character in place"). After watching The Matrix, Gibson commented that the way that the film's creators had drawn from existing cyberpunk works was "exactly the kind of creative cultural osmosis" he had relied upon in his own writing; however, he noted that the film's Gnostic themes distinguished it from Neuromancer, and believed that The Matrix was thematically closer to the work of science fiction author Philip K. Dick, particularly Dick's speculative Exegesis. Other writers have also commented on the similarities between The Matrix and Dick's work; one example of such influence is a Philip K. Dick's 1977 conference, in which he stated: "We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs".

In The Matrix, a copy of Jean Baudrillard's philosophical work Simulacra and Simulation, which was published in French in 1981, is visible on-screen as "the book used to conceal disks", and Morpheus quotes the phrase "desert of the real" from it. "The book was required reading" for the actors prior to filming. However, Baudrillard himself said that The Matrix misunderstands and distorts his work. Some interpreters of The Matrix mention Baudrillard's philosophy to support their claim "that the [film] is an allegory for contemporary experience in a heavily commercialized, media-driven society, especially in developed countries". The influence of The Matrixial Gaze, the philosophical-psychoanalytical concept of Bracha L. Ettinger on the archaic matrixial space that resists the field of simulacra, "was brought to the public's attention through the writings of art historians such as Griselda Pollock and film theorists such as Heinz-Peter Schwerfel". In addition to Baudrillard and Ettinger, the Wachowskis were also significantly influenced by Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, and Dylan Evans's ideas on evolutionary psychology.

Philosopher William Irwin suggests that the idea of the "Matrix" - a generated reality invented by malicious machines - is an allusion to Descartes' " First Meditation", and his idea of an evil demon. The Meditation hypothesizes that the perceived world might be a comprehensive illusion created to deceive us. The same premise can be found in Hilary Putnam's brain in a vat scenario proposed in the 1980s. A connection between the premise of The Matrix and Plato's Allegory of the Cave has also been suggested. The allegory is related to Plato's theory of Forms, which holds that the true essence of an object is not what we perceive with our senses, but rather its quality, and that most people perceive only the shadow of the object and are thus limited to false perception.

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant has also been claimed as another influence on the film, and in particular how individuals within the Matrix interact with one another and with the system. Kant states in his Critique of Pure Reason that people come to know and explore our world through synthetic means (language, etc.), and thus this makes it rather difficult to discern truth from falsely perceived views. This means people are their own agents of deceit, and so in order for them to know truth, they must choose to openly pursue truth. This idea can be examined in Agent Smith's monologue about the first version of the Matrix, which was designed as a human utopia, a perfect world without suffering and with total happiness. Agent Smith explains that, "it was a disaster. No one accepted the program. Entire crops [of people] were lost." The machines had to amend their choice of programming in order to make people subservient to them, and so they conceived the Matrix in the image of the world in 1999. The world in 1999 was far from a utopia, but still humans accepted this over the suffering-less utopia. According to William Irwin this is Kantian, because the machines wished to impose a perfect world on humans in an attempt to keep people content, so that they would remain completely submissive to the machines, both consciously and subconsciously, but humans were not easy to make content.

Andrew Godoski sees allusions to Christ, including Neo's " virgin birth", his doubt in himself, the prophecy of his coming, along with many other Christian references. Amongst these possible allusions, it is suggested that the name of the character Trinity refers to Christianity's doctrine of the Trinity. It has also been noted that the character Morpheus paraphrases the Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi when he asks Neo, "Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference from the real world and the dream world?"

Matrixism is a fan-based possibly satirical religion created as "the matrix religion".

Years after the release of The Matrix, both of the Wachowskis came out as transgender women. The red pill has been compared with red estrogen pills. Morpheus's description of the Matrix creating a sense that something is fundamentally wrong, "like a splinter in your mind", has been compared to gender dysphoria. In the original script, Switch was a woman in the Matrix and a man in the real world, but this idea was removed.

In a 2016 GLAAD Media Awards speech, Lilly Wachowski said: "There's a critical eye being cast back on Lana and I's (sic) work through the lens of our transness. This is a cool thing because it's an excellent reminder that art is never static." In 2020, Lilly said The Matrix was intended as an allegory for gender transition, but that "the corporate world wasn't ready". She said it was "all about the desire for transformation but it was all coming from a closeted point of view", but that she did not know "how present my transness was in the background of my brain" when the Wachowskis were writing it. In an interview with , Reeves said he did not know the film was an allegory for transgender identity during production.

Following The Matrix, films made abundant use of slow motion, spinning cameras, and, often, the bullet time effect of a character freezing or slowing down and the camera dollying around them. The ability to slow down time enough to distinguish the motion of bullets was used as a central gameplay mechanic of several video games, including , in which the feature was explicitly referred to as "bullet time". It was also the defining game mechanic of the game and its sequels. The Matrix's signature special effect, and other aspects of the film, have been parodied numerous times, in comedy films such as Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999), Scary Movie (2000), (2001), Kung Pow! Enter the Fist (2002), (2003); Marx Reloaded in which the relationship between Neo and Morpheus is represented as an imaginary encounter between Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky; and in video games such as Conker's Bad Fur Day. It also inspired films featuring a black-clad hero, a sexy yet deadly heroine, and bullets ripping slowly through the air; these included Charlie's Angels (2000) featuring Cameron Diaz floating through the air while the cameras flo-mo around her; Equilibrium (2002), starring Christian Bale, whose character wore long black leather coats like Reeves' Neo; Night Watch (2004), a Russian megahit heavily influenced by The Matrix and directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who later made (2008), which also features bullets ripping through air; and (2010), which centers on a team of sharply dressed rogues who are able to enter other people's dreams by "wiring in". The original (1982) paved the way for The Matrix, and The Matrix, in turn, inspired Disney to make its own Matrix with a Tron sequel, Tron: Legacy (2010). Also, the film's lobby shootout sequence was recreated in the 2002 Indian action comedy Awara Paagal Deewana.

The Matrix had a strong effect on action filmmaking in Hollywood. The film's incorporation of wire fu techniques, including the involvement of fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping and other personnel with a background in Hong Kong action cinema, affected the approaches to fight scenes taken by some subsequent Hollywood action films, moving them towards more Eastern approaches. The success of The Matrix created high demand for those choreographers and their techniques from other filmmakers, who wanted fights of similar sophistication: for example, wire work was employed in (2000) and Charlie's Angels (2000), and Yuen Woo-ping's brother Yuen Cheung-yan was choreographer on (2003). The Matrix's Asian approach to action scenes also created an audience for Asian action films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) that they might not otherwise have had.

Chad Stahelski, who had been a stunt double on The Matrix prior to directing Reeves in the John Wick series, acknowledged the film's strong influence on the Wick films, and commented, " The Matrix literally changed the industry. The influx of martial-arts choreographers and fight coordinators now make more, and are more prevalent and powerful in the industry, than stunt coordinators. The Matrix revolutionized that. Today, action movies want their big sequences designed around the fights."

Carrie-Anne Moss asserted that prior to being cast in The Matrix, she had "no career". It launched Moss into international recognition and transformed her career; in a New York Daily News interview, she stated, " The Matrix gave me so many opportunities. Everything I've done since then has been because of that experience. It gave me so much". The film also created one of the most devoted movie fan-followings since . The combined success of the Matrix trilogy, the Lord of the Rings films and the Star Wars prequels made Hollywood interested in creating trilogies. Stephen Dowling from the BBC noted that The Matrix's success in taking complex philosophical ideas and presenting them in ways palatable for impressionable minds might be its most influential aspect.

The Matrix was also influential for its impact on superhero films. John Kenneth Muir in The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television called the film a "revolutionary" reimagination of movie visuals, paving the way for the visuals of later superhero films, and credits it with helping to "make comic-book superheroes hip" and effectively demonstrating the concept of "faster than a speeding bullet" with its bullet time effect. Adam Sternbergh of Vulture.com credits The Matrix with reinventing and setting the template for modern superhero blockbusters, and inspiring the superhero renaissance in the early 21st century.

In 2001, The Matrix placed 66th in the American Film Institute's " 100 Years...100 Thrills" list. In 2007, Entertainment Weekly called The Matrix the best science-fiction piece of media for the past 25 years. In 2009, the film was ranked 39th on 's reader-, actor- and critic-voted list of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time". The Matrix was voted as the fourth best science fiction film in the 2011 list Best in Film: The Greatest Movies of Our Time, based on a poll conducted by ABC and . In 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant."

The premise of The Matrix has been repurposed for multiple conspiracy theories and alt-right fringe groups. For example, some online men's rights groups use the term "redpill" to mean men realizing that they are supposedly being subjugated by feminism. The term has been used in discussion forums for right-wing topics such as Gamergate, white supremacy, incel subculture and QAnon. As of 2021, the verb "pill" and suffix "-pilled" had entered more mainstream use and had come to mean developing a sudden interest in something.

The film's mainstream success led to the making of two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both directed by the Wachowskis. These were filmed back-to-back in one shoot and released on separate dates in 2003. The first film's introductory tale is succeeded by the story of the impending attack on the human enclave of Zion by a vast machine army. The sequels also incorporate longer and more ambitious action scenes, as well as improvements in bullet time and other visual effects.

Also released was The Animatrix, a collection of nine animated short films, many of which were created in the same Japanese animation style that was a strong influence on the live action trilogy. The Animatrix was overseen and approved by the Wachowskis, who only wrote four of the segments themselves but did not direct any of them; much of the project was developed by notable figures from the world of anime.

In March 2017, Warner Bros. was in early stages of developing a relaunch of the franchise with Zak Penn in talks to write a treatment and interest in getting Michael B. Jordan attached to star. According to The Hollywood Reporter neither the Wachowskis nor Joel Silver were involved with the endeavor, although the studio would like to get at minimum the blessing of the Wachowskis. On August 20, 2019, Warner Bros. Pictures Group chairman Toby Emmerich officially announced that a fourth Matrix film was in the works, with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss set to reprise their roles as Neo and Trinity, respectively. The Matrix Resurrections was released on December 22, 2021, in theaters and on HBO Max.

In September 2022, Danny Boyle was announced to be directing a dance adaptation of the film, titled Free Your Mind, and debuted in October 2023 in Manchester, England.

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25. ^ Clover, Joshua (2004). The Matrix. London: BFI Publishing. p. 35. ISBN 978-1-84457-045-4.

26. ^ Wood, Aylish (April 17, 2007). Digital Encounters (New ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-41066-3.

27. ^ "Bullet Time before Bullet Time - beforesandafters.com". befores & afters. March 31, 2019.

28. ^ "'Gladiator' Hits DVD Highs". The Los Angeles Times. January 10, 2001. p. 64. Archived from the original on August 2, 2022 - via Newspapers.com.

29. ^ The Matrix Comics. Vol. 1. Burlyman Entertainment. November 2003. ISBN 978-1-84023-806-8.

30. ^ "'Matrix' tops weekend box office". The Cincinnati Enquirer. April 5, 1999. p. 33. Archived from the original on November 6, 2022 - via Newspapers.com.

31. ^ "Weekend moviegoers make 'Matrix' No. 1". The Des Moines Register. April 26, 1999. p. 27. Archived from the original on May 19, 2023 - via Newspapers.com.

32. ^ Gray, Brandon. "Forecast: Matrix Reclaims #1". Box Office Mojo. Archived from the original on May 19, 2022.

33. ^ "Votes for The Matrix (1999)". Sight & Sound. British Film Institute. Archived from the original on November 26, 2018.

34. ^ Strick, Philip. "Sight & Sound - The Matrix (1999)". Sight & Sound. British Film Institute. Archived from the original on October 3, 2018.

35. Ebert, Roger (March 31, 1999). "The Matrix". RogerEbert.com. Archived from the original on August 16, 2021. "The Matrix" recycles the premises of "Dark City" and "Strange Days,"...

36. ^ Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "The Matrix". Chicago Reader. Sun-Times Media Group. Archived from the original on April 21, 2006.

37. ^ Wachowski, Larry; Wachowski, Andy; Darrow, Geof; Skroce, Steve; Kunitake, Tani; Manser, Warren; Grant, Colin; Staenberg, Zach; Oesterhouse, Phil; Gibson, William (2000). Lamm, Spencer (ed.). The Art of The Matrix. Titan Books Ltd (published November 24, 2000). p. 451. ISBN 978-1-84023-173-1.

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39. ^ Pegg, Simon (2010). Nerd Do Well. London: Random House. p. 323. ISBN 978-1-84605-811-0.

40. ^ Rinaldi, Ray Mark (March 27, 2000). "Crystal has a sixth sense about keeping overhyped, drawn-out Oscar broadcast lively". Off the Post-Dispatch. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. p. 27. Archived from the original on May 19, 2023 - via Newspapers.com.

41. ^ Stucky, Mark (October 2005). "He is the One: The Matrix Trilogy's Postmodern Movie Messiah". The Journal of Religion and Film. 9 (2). Archived from the original on November 24, 2018.

42. ^ Jones, Steven Edward (2006). "Simulacra in the Matrix". Against Technology. From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism. CRC Press. p. 131. ISBN 978-0-415-97868-2.

43. ^ "The Matrix (1999) - Film Review from FilmFour". Film4. Channel Four Television Corporation. Archived from the original on May 25, 2010. The film is a perfect product of its time. It is a very modern conspiracy thriller, a film based, like The Truman Show, on the appealingly terrifying notion of a universal conspiracy - that life itself and everything that we know and take for granted are lies. It's also a film steeped in the traditionals of Japanese anime and megamixed philosophy and semiotics (spot the Baudrillard references kids).

44. ^ Rowley, Stephen (June 18, 2003). "What Was the Matrix?". sterow.com. Archived from the original on January 20, 2012. The Matrix was the third in a cycle of movies to arrive in the late nineties with a strikingly similar theme. Like its predecessors from the previous year, Dark City and The Truman Show, it tells the story of a seemingly ordinary man who suddenly finds that his whole life is faked: he is trapped in an artificially created environment designed to keep him in submission. Like the heroes of those earlier movies, Keanu Reeves' Neo starts to realise that he is somehow special, and tries to escape the confines of his prison.

45. ^ Condon, Paul (July 26, 2003). The Matrix Unlocked. Contender Books. pp. 141-3. ISBN 978-1-84357-093-6.

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49. ^ Morrison, Grant (2011). Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero. London: Random House/Jonathan Cape. p. 315. I was taken to see The Matrix ... and saw what seemed to me my own combination of ideas enacted on the screen: fetish clothes, bald heads, kung fu, and magic, witnessing the Gnostic invasion of the Hollywood mainstream.

50. ^ Leiren-Young, Mark (January 6, 2012). "Is William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' the Future of Movies?". The Tyee. Archived from the original on December 21, 2019. One of the obstacles in the selling of this movie to the industry at large is that everyone says, 'Oh, well, The Matrix did it already.' Because The Matrix - the very word 'matrix' - is taken from Neuromancer, they stole that word, I can't use it in our movie.

51. L. P. Davies. ^ The White Room. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1969. Page 168.

52. ^ Axmaker, Sean (June 25, 2002). "Philip K. Dick's dark dreams still fodder for films". Seattle Post Intelligencer. Archived from the original on March 18, 2020. Even the seeds of his concepts, however, sprout resonant ideas that the biggest special effects can't destroy, and they have pollinated the creative ground of many other films, from the moral quandaries posed by technology in "The 6th Day" to the paranoia and sanity-threatening conspiracies of "The Truman Show" and "The Matrix."

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56. ^ Ettinger, Bracha L., The Matrixial Borderspace. [Selected Essays from 1994-1999). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

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58. ^ Schwerfel, Heinz-Peter, Kino und Kunst. Koln: Dumont, 2003.

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62. ^ Pitre, Jake (March 27, 2019). "How The Matrix Has Gone from Men's Rights Dream to Formative Trans Masterpiece". SyFy Wire. Archived from the original on April 1, 2019.

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64. ^ "The Game World: Bullet Time". Max Payne: Official Police Dossier (game manual). PC CD ROM version. 2001. p. 19. When pressed into a tight spot, Max can activate Bullet Time, which will slow the action around him, while allowing him to aim his weapons in real-time. This ... even allows Max to dodge oncoming bullets.

65. ^ Muir, John Kenneth (2008). The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television, 2d ed. McFarland & Company. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-7864-3755-9.

66. ^ Ojumu, Akin (May 18, 2003). "Observer Profile: Andy and Larry Wachowski". Guardian.co.uk. Guardian Media Group. Archived from the original on September 11, 2014. The Matrix Reloaded, which opens here on Friday. ... Andy and Larry Wachowski were apparently busy working on the third part of the trilogy, The Matrix Revolutions, which will be released in November. ... With the resources of Warner Bros. at their disposal, the siblings indulged themselves on the next two, which were shot back-to-back in Australia.

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The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction action film written and directed by the Wachowskis. It is the first installment in the Matrix film series, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving and Joe Pantoliano, and depicts a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside the Matrix, a simulated reality that intelligent machines have created to distract humans while using their bodies as an energy source.

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distopia means the opposite of  utopia, I think every country in the world is idstopia wold, they are all acting that they are a utopia world

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distopia means the opposite of  utopia, I think every country in the world is idstopia wold, they are all acting that they are a utopia world