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Uh, Drew, don't listen to them -- "Wild Things" is exactly what you expect it to be from the title alone. Thanks to Denise Richards' bare bosum (and for the ladies, Kevin Bacon's bogus boner), it's stimulating, all right, but hardly intellectually stimulating.
But as you bring up "Dark City," it's my personal belief that "The Matrix" was only the third best VR movie of the late 90s, after "Truman Show" and "Dark City" and slightly ahead of "13th Floor." (I'm sure somebody's going to bring up "eXistenZ"... bleh...) No doubt that "The Matrix" was the most visually stunning movie of the genre and possibly of the period but for God's sake, it had dialogue like "We need guns! Lots of guns!" "Bound" had much better and more realistic characters, stronger acting behind them, true tense moments (Joe deserved an Oscar for that scene in which he lost his mind alone) and generally more intelligent writing. There were some very interesting ideas in "The Matrix" but as has been pointed out a billion times, they weren't all that original. The baby batteries was probably the coolest idea the W brothers came up with for that movie.
TM: NO. As I said, only "The Phantom Menace" had stipulations anything like that previously. That's not to say that distributors and studios don't play hardball with theaters on a weekly basis -- they usually do make demands (or requests) about what size auditorium and the number of auditoriums their prints go into. But there's really nothing wrong with that -- after all, it's THEIR print, not the theater's -- we have to give the print back to them when we're done with it. If we don't want to follow their rules, we don't have to take the print! But generally, the "rules" are more like guidelines and they're fairly sensible. It's only fair to put the newest movie in the largest auditoriums, right? Hell, we'd be stupid not to! It's not Disney's week 1 stipulations that bug me because most theaters would do what they're asking even without being told. Three weeks down the road when "Pearl Harbor" dies down and "Tomb Raider" opens -- there's the problem if Disney's telling theaters they still have to keep X amount of those old prints in the largest auditoriums. That could indeed be punitive to business. But once again, if we don't want to play that kind of ball, we can tell 'em to keep their damn $300M grossing print.
If I recall correctly, Lucas required "Phantom Menace" to be kept in the largest auditoriums of theaters for its first seven weeks. Now that was just OUTRAGEOUS. Older theaters that didn't have all digital houses couldn't ever move it out of its digital houses either. It was also considered a "special engagement" forever, meaning no free passes could be accepted for that movie for months. Really, the "Pearl Harbor" rules are tame by comparison, but they're still well beyond what any other studio has required for a movie other than "Phantom Menace." "Titanic," as best as I can remember, had the same rules as any other movie, but that didn't prevent it from making $600M...
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