10 Awesome Films That Never Got The Cult Following They Deserved 

The Film:

Alex Proyas’ 1998 neo-noir science fiction thriller Dark City follows a man named John Murdoch, who awakens in a bath tub suffering from amnesia. After receiving a mysterious phone call warning of their coming, John narrowly escapes the apartment before The Strangers arrive to take him into their custody.

As his dark pursuers attempt to hunt him down, Murdoch begins to discover that the world he inhabited before he woke up in the tub is not actually real. Before long, he learns how to manipulate this fabricated reality and use it against The Strangers, who are keeping mankind blind to the illusion so they can keep them as their cattle.

Why It Never Got The Cult Following It Deserved:

If the plot of Dark City sounds familiar, it is probably because you've seen the movie that stole its place as a cult film dozens of times. The Matrix lifted ideas from a number of existing properties and blended them perfectly, though while many point out the various similarities between the Wachowski's classic and Japanese animé Ghost in the Shell, the real injustice happened a lot closer to home.

Dark City came out the year before The Matrix, dealing with a number of the same ideas, mainly including - but not limited to - the discovery of a fake digital world obscuring the truth from an enslaved and unwitting mankind. On top of that, the villainous Strangers have names like Mister Book and Mister Wall as opposed to Agent Smith and Agent Brown in The Matrix, and the whole thing comes to a head with a gravity defying battle.

The Wachowski’s even filmed parts of The Matrix in the same Sydney studio that the Proyas used, with some of the exact same sets and choreography. In essence, the siblings took Dark City and made it better, meaning a film that should have gone on to be considered essential sci-fi was labelled a poor man's Matrix and ignored.