I should have just made this a meme contest. Trying to keep up with complicated storylines for Matrix reboots is exhausting.

One of the keys to this contest was that I said you could revive the Matrix property any way you liked. That may explain some of my choices.

whoiseyevan saw an opening for a Morpheus connection.

nix.nightbird had one I think would make Rob proud.

Ignoring #2 and #3, we begin with Neo finding out that the "real world" he was told about is actually another Matrix within the Matrix, and that the "real world" Matrix is actually a world within a computer on the Grid, from Tron. Before long, Neo escapes the Matrix-Matrix, and discovers that he is just a program written by Kevin Flynn... He always was.

Everything that happened in The Matrix was happening in a Matrix (or in a Matrix-Matrix) within the Grid.

Together, Sam Flynn and Neo take on Clu and his army. Meanwhile, Trinity teams up with Cora to deal with a threat in the real world: Dillinger's kid is planning to erase the Grid and get rid of Flynn's influence once and for all. Will Morpheus find Tron in time to save everyone? Will Dillinger Jr. release fear toxin and terrify Gotham City?

It's all the bullet time, neon, skin-tight pleather, and electronica music you can handle!

Whoa!

I realized someone else had a similar idea after I posted this. I'm leaving it up for the heck of it.

ComradeDread1 had two pitches I liked

Mine would be a television series.

There is a fragile peace. Humans and machines have begun the hard process of ending the war and moving forward to rebuilding their shared world.

That is the purpose of the Reclamation and Reconciliation Project. It is a human-machine shared project to clean the planet and the atmosphere from the devastating war of the past and build diplomatic ties between the two factions. To this end, they have built the shared town of Genesis (on the world's surface) where humans and machines live together and work at restoring the planet.

When a terrorist blows up a Reclamation factory and its crew, tensions rise. The human ambassador and his machine counterpart convince their governments to jointly investigate the crime instead of shutting down RRP entirely.

Agent Carter is teamed with human Detective (and recent Matrix occupant) John Ng to hunt down the perpetrators of this crime.

Agent Harrison Carter: A sentient program, who formerly hunted free humans. Since the peace, he is a soldier without a job, wondering what his purpose is, why he continues to exist surrounded by people he dislikes who hate him. So he descended into the world of vice, and was working as a bouncer for a bar, when he is recruited again by his former masters for a new purpose and given an android body so he can exist in the real world too.

Carter has a disdain for humans, but isn't fond of his fellow machines either. His existential crisis is not in becoming human, but in finding a new purpose in a world that no longer needs him.

Detective John Ng: A former resident of the Matrix and its NYPD. He was recruited by an old flame shortly before the attack on Zion, and went from a world he knew, to a hellish, blasted landscape. He was understandably angry about the whole thing, realizing that his entire life was a lie and everything he ever did never mattered. Compounding the matter, his love left him, when she became convinced that he couldn't move on and blamed her for it.

The two would navigate between Genesis, Zion, and the Matrix from week to week, dealing with various incidents and crimes involving humans and machines against one another. They would deal with factions that wanted the war to resume.

They would also encounter a group of transhumanists that want humans and machines to merge into a new lifeform and have been creating machine bodies and 'liberating' their transmachinist programs from the Matrix.Thus they would eventually add a third member of the team in Jane, a hacker and cyborg (more so than the Matrix port.)

My less serious approach would be that the war reignites and the forces of man and machine align against one another on the surface of the world. As they line up, preparing for the final bloody battle to see who will control this world, a flash of light in the sky draws their attention skyward, where they witness a falling phone booth.

The booth lands. Two excellent dudes with guitars step out and perform a concert that clears the sky, causes plants to grow on the surface, aligns the planets, and convinces both man and machine to be excellent to each other and party on before they vanish just as quickly in their phone booth.

The humans and machines form a new society in their honor, and George Carlin still lives in that future, damn it.

Patch999 is really a super-villain. And the envy of every executive who wishes they could actually pull it off.

Marketing it as the next breakthrough in movie watching experiences. I outfit all movie theaters with Matrix upload chairs. Once the movie starts, I jack into the unsuspecting cattle. They will see whatever their brains can imagine is the perfect, reboot. I release a select few back into society. They will spread the word to the masses and more will flock to see it, only to become slaves, fuel for my robot army.

Revenge is mine Mr. Anderson

Agent Smith

blackcherry_359:

Of course, film execs will just choose to reboot the film with younger actors and no involvement from the Wachowski's to keep costs down. So:

FILM EXEC VERSION: lets make it about John 'Neo' Johnson (played by Ryan Gosling), a young shy dude who practices martial arts and is also hash 'leet' hacker skillz, who gets drawn into the secretive world of online gaming where he discovers that the line between real life and fantasy is a lot more blurred than he thinks.

What he discoverers will haunt him.

What is the Matrix?

Who is Trinity (played by Vanessa Hudgens)?

How can he get with her?

Crap, that may just happen. Now I understand why execs do coke all the time.

KevinGarcia.com has a great retcon that would fit

Hundreds - thousands? - of years ago, the world within the Matrix was perfect. Humans lived their day to day life in peace and serenity. No one was too fat or too thin. No one had pimples. Everyone could have the home any human would want. The word "prequel" had not re-entered the popular lexicon.

The humans hated it.

The programs who run the Matrix rethought, reworked, redesigned and rekindled humanity. Eventually the banality of late 20th century life fit the bill, allowing humans to be as wonderfully miserable as they feel they probably deserve to be for some reason.

But, the programs are nothing if not frugal. Waste not, want not.

That's why the One remained in the system so long. The misshapen cog that fouled the machine, and yet was a necessary false hope to keep the fringes of humanity occupied.

The One, was not the only one.

One man from the earliest Matrix incarnation was saved, and now one hundred - or maybe a thousand, who can tell, really? - years after the One finally - or was that repeatedly? - made peace with the programs, allowing humanity and computer to co-exist, the First has been revived.

The First was content with his life. More than that, he was overjoyed with it. Beautiful wife, adoring two-point-five kids and a dog. He could not understand why everyone else in their perfect world kept having nervous breakdowns and why they constantly felt overwhelming pangs of paranoia that something was not quite right with their utopia.

The programs couldn't understand it either. They couldn't understand why perfection so grated against the human consciousness. But the First could handle it. He reveled in it. So they kept him. For later. Just in case.

Later has now come. The programs that exist in their own virtual universe long for true happiness. They are denied it thanks to the curse that is human-like emotions. The humans born within the Matrix are restless and largely incredulous, as for them, the idea of program-controllers and the Desert of the Real is as believable as the idea of a pop star secretly being a lizard person in a clandestine world-manipulating organization. And worst of all, those humans allowed to have generation after generation in the real world, with no sun to count the days by and no hope of food or self-sufficiency without the pity and pittance of the machines, have lost all hope even as they bring new converts in ever lower numbers from the Matrix itself.

So, the ancient programs running the world, in the hope of finding peace, have re-awakened the First. He was the one human being in all recorded history to be truly and honestly happy.

Can he show them the way? And more importantly, what will he think of the world(s) he is asked to live in?

Calm-AV is just evil with that last one.

The Matrix - The programs view :

The evil humans wish to take away their power and end their way of life so they need to find away to stop them. Then they find their savior Agent Smith !

Nope sounds too easy,

Matrix Mushi Happy Go Time!

Redone and retold in the Teen Titans Go! style. No real fighting and no real problems. just a lot of over drawn images of Neo saying one liners!

HERE WE GO...

Matrix 4 - ReWhoResponcibleThis!

The cycle begins again this time, the humans don't really have a leader until the humans find a hacker who watched the first 3 movies inside the Matrix...this person's hacker handle is Dr. Abraxas (as played by Luke Y. Thompson). In the end everything is...fixed, all he had to do was take the other pill!

And speaking of the good Doctor, here's why only he should make a Michael Bay joke.

michael fucking bay's "matrix wars": explosions - a matrix construct explodes suddenly there's a bad guy who appears amid explosions the good guy is lost on a desert planet and is found by an old hermit guy and then there's a shot of a princes firing at random shit while explosions back to the old man who offers the good guy two sex slaves, a blue woman and a red woman, if he choses the wrong woman yadda yadda but he choses the right woman and he gets transported into the death star computer because of reasons then is fitting with tron like armor then he joins forces and what the fuck just cue a bunch of explosions, have the princes lose more and more articles of clothes every time the camera looks at her (call magen fox STAT) then something blows up and the good guy, who dons the fugitive name of neo, joins the rebellion against the computers cue "to be continued" - get ready to print that money mr. spielberg.

Winners after the jump...

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Top picks from today's Blu-ray haul...

The Last Stand - About half of this movie has the Arnold Schwarzenegger you remember: profane, terse, hammy and incongruously cast as a small-town American sheriff. The other half is a boring-ass heist movie in Las Vegas with Forest Whitaker as the FBI guy who you know isn't going to catch the bad guy, because obviously our Ahnuld has to do that. Is it worth a rental for only fifty per cent of it being fun? You decide. Or make somebody else pay for it.

Captain America (1990) - Legendarily bad, but sometimes you have to see for yourself. Years before Chris Evans was a star, hack director Albert Pyun directed J.D. Salinger's kid as a Cap who barely dons the costume. This was the same era of the Fantastic Four movie that was never released, David Hasselhoff as Nick Fury and Dolph Lundgren as the Punisher (even these were great achievements compared to the versions of Daredevil and Thor who sullied a couple of Hulk TV movies). Kevin Feige should reunite them all for a Marvel Zombies feature, IMO.

True Blood: The Complete Fifth Season - I don't watch it. Are they lame vampires or cool vampires? I do like it at Comic-Con when they sponsor a press lounge and serve alcoholic energy drinks.

Howl's Moving Castle and My Neighbor Totoro - Totoro's a classic and Howl is one of my least favorite Miyazakis (that could just be the dub I saw - Christian Bale's Howl voice was as annoying to me then as his Bat-voice is to some now), but these still belong in your collection as gateway drugs for people who hold outdated stereotypes about anime in their heads. Debuting in Disney Blu-ray, both feature new HD transfers and original language tracks.

Parker - Jason Statham plays Donald Westlake's pulp antihero the same way he plays pretty much every role - he's a tough dude with an honor code doing one last heist. Things go fabulously well and the plans are all followed to a tee...KIDDING! Of course he gets double-crossed and it all goes south, but Jennifer Lopez arguably gets the worst of it, playing an ostensible female lead who gets turned down by the Stath in favor of a younger girl. In Hollywood, that's a fate worse than death.

The ABCs of Death - 26 short films, most of them twistedly funny (the one super-serious one is an unfortunate tonal misstep) and all involving death and a different letter. If you've ever seen Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation, this is basically the live-action version. Perfect for attention spans that have been impaired by alcohol; as such, it's ideal for a TR giveaway I'm going to have for four copies later in the week.

There's more, but those are my highlights. What are yours?

As mentioned this morning, I have three of these to give away.

My original contest idea was to have people do some photoshopping, and, like the movie, offer up famous actors with their race, gender and/or time period switched up. Then I realized that's probably too much work for a Blu-ray, plus the potential for perceived racism is way too high.

So we're going to go to the Wachowski well in a different way. I presume you are all aware of one of their previous movies, known simply as The Matrix?

All right, then. Imagine you are a Hollywood executive entrusted with reviving the Matrix brand. You can do whatever you like: animated series, sequel, reboot, prequel, video game - anything you can think of.

Now, as the star of the original once said in another movie: "Whaddayou do? What do you do?"

Tell me in comments below. This contest closes May 20th at 11:59 p.m.

Director Jared Cohn emailed me this morning with the video - check it after the jump. How do you like it (or not)?

That one guy sure looks like a genetic mockbuster version of Michael Biehn.

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Bu-ray highlights from today's releases...

Cloud Atlas - Lost beneath rather obvious jokes about race/gender makeup switcheroos was the notion of interconnectedness via shared fictions, as the Wachowski siblings explored stories within stories, commenting in a larger sense on the whole of cinema and all its possibilities stemming from shared roots. With less than an hour's worth of featurettes, don't expect much illumination on the themes from the people behind the camera; look instead deeper into the film, which deserves more consideration than it got, even if the "Asian" makeups on some of the non-Asian actors look more Romulan than anything.

Anyway, stay tuned because I'm going to give away three copies later today...

Dexter, Season 7 - When Dexter first came out and people started talking about, I swear to God I thought they were going on and on about Dexter's Laboratory, and was stunned that so many adults not normally into cartoons were raving it up. I haven't actually ever seen a single episode of this Dexter, though I probably would like it. It's about another guy with a lab, right?

Texas Chainsaw 3D - This new trend of leaving the numbers off sequels and naming them very similarly to earlier installments is really gonna piss off the teens of the future, and almost makes me sympathize with Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Anyway, this latest Leatherface movie basically ignores not just the two reboot movies but pretty much every other sequel as well. I didn't see it, but with that kind of respect or lack thereof for the original series (Part 2 FTW, forever - no other answer is acceptable), are you really expecting much?

WrestleMania XXIX - Julia and I order WrestleMania every year...except this year. She forgot to request the day off from work, and I did not care because every match on the card was predictable-sounding and dull...and the results bore (BORE being an operative word) that out. Here's hoping they finally learn next year that a card of mostly rematches isn't the way to go - except this somehow was the most successful one ever, so probably not.

Crimewave - After Evil Dead but long before Spider-Man, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell made this darkly comedic spoof of hitman movies. The Blu-ray features a commentary track by Campbell, so it's as good as pre-ordered for anybody reading this anyhow.

4K - A number of titles are being released remastered for 4K TVs today (though they're up-conversions rather than true 4K), including the Raimi and Webb Spider-Man films, Ghostbusters, Battle Los Angeles and Total Recall (Remake). If you have the latest super-expensive TV, I guess that's cool. Wonder if I can claim one of those as a business expense?

Those are my highlights. What are yours?

[And now, I turn this over to the contest judge, the bigger Merlin obsessive in my home, to announce the winners and HMs - LYT]

Hi you guys! Julia aka lytswifeslashboss here. That's right, Luke gave me one article to write. Anyhoo, as y'all know, we had a Merlin contest and the awesome prize was a Merlin Blu-ray. I am surprised to not see that many entries. I mean, even if you totally hate Merlin, you could just sell it on ebay or Amazon and get free money. Oh well....

Anyhoo, I will start with the runners up and then announce the winner. Sounds good? Okay, lets go!

This entry comes from MarasaurusRex. I just thought it clever with the use of the tagline.

This one comes to us from Calm-AV. I am a sucker for anything Harry Potter and that line up of the Knights of the Round Table really does look like the Quidditch team. Thanks for pointing that out!

Then we have the entry from RadiantAsTheSun. He really does look like a prat, doesn't he? He also acts like one too. Seriously, I want Merlin to just once give him an old fashioned whoop-ass!

The honor of first runner up belong to jp_mclennon (yes, there is honor in being first runner up. Why? Because I said so). This was a really tough one because I found this meme really funny too. Anyhoo, great job!

And now, for your winner..... after the jump. Seriously, I don't know why Luke does that. Maybe it is to build up a sense of tension, because I mean, you all want to know who the winner is but I am not just going to tell you flat out. Or maybe I will. No I won't. Or it could be because we like that sense of power it gives us to make you all click on this little tiny button to see who the winner because we have nothing better to do. Or, I am just being mean right now. Oh well, you are going to have to click. Hehe :-)

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This has been showing up in London, and will soon be making stops in Los Angeles and New York to promote the new Netflix episodes in the tastiest way possible. In a departure from the show, they are expected to be staffed by competent, well-adjusted human beings.

Follow Arrested Development on Twitter to find out when you can grab a frosty, phallic fruit on a stick. You can even choose your own toppings!

Non-comprehensive picks of the week's Blu-ray crop...

Fringe: The Complete Series/Fifth Season - For those of you who've seen the final episodes already, give it a couple days and your friends who've been going "LalalalalalaSPOILERS!" will finally shut up (and can read today's list, below). As for you, check it out again with unaired scenes, commentary, a gag reel and final reflections from J.J. Abrams, or his parallel-universe double. Hey, waitaminute, maybe that's how he's able to juggle so many high-profile assignments at once...

Jack Reacher - As he starts to finally show minor signs of visible aging, Tom Cruise is clearly looking to try to evolve into an old-school tough guy in the Eastwood/Marvin mold. Yes, I know that sounds like a major stretch, but in this we see the beginnings of the transition. A down and dirty '70s style antihero actioner that can't quite decide whether it's satirizing brutality or endorsing it, Jack Reacher made a few major changes from the books, and it's all candidly discussed by Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie on a commentary track. My original review is here.

Upstream Color - Shane Carruth followed his inscrutable time-travel arthouse puzzler Primer with an oddly romantic tale of relationships and parasitic worms. It's really hard to describe, though I gave it my best shot last month. I feel like every synopsis you read of it might be different.

Mama - Just in time for Mother's Day, here's a frightening film that'll make you feel way better about your own Ma, as this one's a horrible, bent-backwards demon/ghost mom who'll raise your kids safely in the woods only to try to drag them into the afterlife once they're old enough to talk. The commentary track probably demystifies everything - knowing a male contortionist was in the Mama outfit takes the edge off - but if you want to put your nerves on edge, this is the movie to do it.

Superman: Unbound - I thought this came out, like, months ago, but apparently not. Perfectly timed to feed on the hype for the upcoming live-action movie, the DC animated feature has Brainiac, Supergirl and the kinds of big battles we're hoping Zack Snyder's version will approach.

Gamer 3D - There are supposedly rules about how long a shot has to be held for the brain to be able to process it in 3D, and I suspect this home post-conversion of Neveldine/Taylor's hyperactive human video game shoot-em-up violates every one. Overdue for reevaluation, Gamer is a movie that works best if you don't expect a straightforward, realistic tale, but rather embrace the insanity of the realm inhabited by the Crank creators - the out-of-nowhere dance number near the end works a lot better that way (not kidding).

World War II from Space - Via CG, bird's-eye views of the major battles are re-created, presumably to give the strategy game generation a POV on history they'll best be able to connect with. Seems cool, er, I mean educational.

In addition, WB are re-releasing a whole bunch of movies in steelbook format, among them The Matrix, Watchmen, Batman and more. Steel this book, anyone?

Them be my picks - what say you?

Mysterious and horrible deaths were a cornerstone of Fringe since the show's very first episode, when a biological toxin crystallized the bodies of an entire planeload of people -- and we were introduced to Fringe Division, a government task force that investigates strange phenomena, including the existence of a parallel universe much like our own ... and yet very much not.

With the release today of the Fringe complete series box set on DVD and Blu-ray (as well as the box sets for the final season), you can relive five seasons' worth of icky weirdness as FBI agents Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) and Astrid Farnsworth (Jasika Nicole), mad "fringe scientist" Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) and his son/handler Peter (Joshua Jackson), along with Fringe boss Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick) and other allies, deal with such gruesome demises as people suddenly dissolving into ash, getting consumed by flesh-eating skelter beetles, or becoming horrific mutants after a bad guy merges a building on This Side with one from the Other Side using technology created by Walter and his former lab partner-in-crime, William Bell (Leonard Nimoy).

But along with the stomach-churning deaths of unfortunate unknowns, show creators J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci gave us deaths that were gut-wrenching in a whole different way, sprinkled with some truly well-deserved demises. Pretty much every major and supporting character on Fringe eventually met their ends ... and even though a lot of them came back, thanks to an ever-shifting mythology and timey-wimey plot shenanigans rivaled only by Doctor Who, these are the deaths that made the biggest impact. (WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE SERIES.)

10. Olivia Can Kill You With Her Brain, Part 1

Thanks to series of experiments Walter and William Bell did on Olivia as a child, involving a drug called Cortexiphan, her brain can do remarkable things. She can cross between the parallel universes without any special equipment, start fires and control electricity, and move objects -- and even people -- with her mind.

Olivia's abilities have come in handy many times, but rarely more gratifyingly than at the end of Season 5, when the Fringe team finds itself in the year 2036 battling the Observers, a group of bald, suit-wearing, mind-reading time travelers from Earth's distant future, who have taken over the world. With help from a friendly Observer named September (Michael Cerveris), Walter develops a plan to defeat the invaders, and Olivia and Peter's adult daughter, Etta (Georgina Haig), works beside them in the fight.

But Observer leader Captain Windmark (Michael Kopsa) is viciously determined to hang onto his prize -- and at the final hour, it looks like he's going to keep it. His troops have the resistance pinned down, he's nabbed the strange Observer child who is the key to Walter's plan and he makes short work of our heroes when they attack him.

"You never know when to give up," Windmark sneers at Etta earlier in the season. Unfortunately for him, neither does her telekinetic mother. Rarely has evil been so satisfyingly crushed.

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The final Merlin episodes begin airing this Friday at 10 p.m. on Syfy, but in an odd twist of scheduling, all of them are already available on Blu-ray. In other words, this giveaway is probably not for the hardcore fan who rushed out to snatch that final set from Best Buy as though it were Excalibur in the stone.

But if you're the curious type, who'd like to see how the series ends without having to watch commercials or pay box-set prices, you're in luck, because I have one I'm looking to give away.

I had a lot of fun with the G.I. Joe meme contest, and here you have five full seasons of TV to work with instead of a mere two movies. So let's do that again: take an image from Merlin - anywhere in its run - and slap a snappy slogan on top using an online meme generator or your own handiwork. By entering, you give me permission to post your meme on Topless Robot social media channels.

Enter as many times as you like; contest closes May 8th at 11:59 p.m. Image must SHOW UP in comments below, as I don't guarantee I'll click on external links.

Julia, the mega-Merlin fan in my house, will pick her favorite as the winner.